Productivity In A Gloomy World – Why Happiness Is Your Sharpest Edge

In a world flooded with bad news and burnout, is happiness the ultimate productivity hack or just self-help fluff? In this conversation with happiness coach and CEO Matt O’Neill, we unpack how mastering your moods can become a competitive advantage at work and at home, especially when everything around you feels heavy. Listeners walk away with concrete tools to handle negative thoughts, navigate the eight “bad moods,” and design teams and routines where joy directly fuels performance

Speaker Bio
Matt O'Neill is a Happiness Coach whose work has positively impacted the lives of over 100,000 people. He's the author of "Good Mood Revolution: Igniting the Power of Conscious Happiness" - #1 best seller in 7 different categories on Amazon, with over 140 Five-Star reviews.

Matt shows us how our path to the most positive emotions is through the negative ones. Understanding this, you will see how happiness is your choice, even when life gets tough.

Speaker Links
 https://www.mattoneill.com

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Transcript

1:35

Matt O'Neill, welcome to Productivitree! Santi, I am so happy to be here with you today. Amazing. Matt, you teach that happiness is a choice even when life gets tough. What does choosing happiness actually look like on a typical Tuesday when things are not going well for you and you have a bad day at work? Yeah, when we have a bad day at work, choosing happiness is not something where we just say, well, I'll just be happy. We have to deal with the reality. We have to deal with what's actually happening around us. But the fact about happiness is that it's a choice of perspective. So what is a bad day at work? That's something that we were perceiving that today should have been different than it was. So that choice of perspective that today should have been something other than it was makes us feel bad. What if we had a totally different perspective? What if we were somebody that thought, man, I'm lucky to have a job today. There are many people out there that wish that they could live the life that I live. And we change our perspective to somebody who maybe isn't as blessed and isn't as fortunate as we are financially, with our health, with our family, with our relationships. Immediately we could get into gratitude for how great our life is. It's just all choices. Matt, were you always like this? Were you always so grounded with your choices? Or there was a moment where you said, well, I need to look at life from a different perspective. I am definitely an optimist and I have been. I've been somebody who like you, Santi, sees the glass half full. And no, I used to think that the negative emotions would come in like a storm cloud. and there was really nothing I could do to control them. And then I just had to wait out the storm. And once the storm passed, the sun would come out again. And then I had kind of an awakening from that when I saw the movie, The Secret. I was 25 years old when I saw that. And I read the book Think and Grow Rich right around the same time. Both of those two things started to show me that my thoughts were creating my reality. and that the external reality I was experiencing was really just experienced within my own mind. And I'm like, okay, so the thought shows up and then the emotion shows up. this emotion was not something that was like something I couldn't control. The emotion was something I could control. And since that time, it's now been two decades of intense study, teaching, and work on understanding how all of this stuff comes together, what the negative emotions are, what the positive emotions are, and what the best techniques are for us to feel our best as often as we can. But you say that happiness is a skill, not a personality trait. So if we treat happiness like a skill, what does practice look like? I love that, Santi. Yes. So what's more important than being happy? Everything we do, every single thing we do is to feel as good as we can. So... We may not realize it, but all the different activities we're doing throughout the day are really geared towards our future happiness. That's what we're trying to do. But nobody really teaches us how to actually be happy. the first step is awareness. Until we're aware, we're unaware. And this is what I was saying that, okay, the bad moods would roll in. I didn't know that I was controlling them. I really was. But there's nobody else inside of your head that's making you feel the way you feel. You, the person listening to this episode, you are the only one making you feel anything. has nothing to do with the weather, if you stubbed your toe, if you lost your job, if you got a divorce, if you got an illness. Because in all of these situations, on a rainy day, there's somebody that's dancing in the rain. Somebody that went through a divorce, they're saying, that's the best thing that ever happened to me. Somebody who got a diagnosis, eventually, a lot of them say that diagnosis is one of the best things that ever happened to me. It woke me up from the sleepwalk I was doing through life. So no matter what the circumstance is, your choice about how you feel about it is completely up to you and therefore you control every way that you feel. You often talk about conscious happiness. What's the difference between someone who is unconsciously chasing good feelings and someone is consciously designing their emotional life? Yeah, unconsciously chasing good feelings usually leads us to hedonism, which is the seeking of pleasure. We're going to eat the sweets and the sugary things because that feels good in the moment, or we're going to take the drugs, we're going to drink the alcohol, or we're going to be lazy. All of these short term choices that we think are going to lead to long term happiness. Another thing we'll do is we'll scroll social media or we'll go and check out and watch a bunch of things on TV. These don't actually lead to happiness. like, it's like the short term spike of sugar, the short term high that we get from the drugs, the short term break we get from watching social media, all of it actually decreases happiness over time. We get fat, we don't feel confident about ourselves. We have drug addictions, we feel pretty bad about ourselves. We spend all of our time on TV, we don't feel good about ourselves. Social media has proven to make us less happy. So that's unconscious seeking of happiness in ways that don't work. consciously deciding to be happy is first understanding what the negative emotions are. There's only eight of them. When we get into one consciously saying I put myself into this emotion, there's a reason for it. There is a lesson. There's something that my soul or my subconscious wants me to learn about whatever's happening right now. I can take some action, learn about it and then move into consciously a higher state of being. And there are high emotions that we want to target. I teach about these different emotions in my book, but we can talk about all of them here on this show. Let's go through some of the moods that you just mentioned out of the eight bad moods. And I'm interested in those that take the biggest toll in terms of productivity, which is the topic of this podcast. Yes, every negative emotion will have a hindrance to productivity other than one. One can actually help productivity and that's anger. Anger is a catalyst for change. So. But we don't want to use anger in a way that's directed at other people. If we get angry or we get frustrated or we get annoyed, that could be a really, really powerful thing because now we finally got to the point where we want to do something about it. If we direct that anger towards what could I do, how could I take responsibility for this thing I'm frustrated, annoyed or angry about and how could I be better or what could I do to change my circumstances, anger can actually be very, very productive. It just is never productive if we point it at somebody else. It won't work. The most productivity sapping emotion is guilt. This is the one that we think is gonna help us. It's that person, the type A personality, say, nobody's harder on me than I am on myself. And I drive myself to perfectionist, to perfectionist. We think that being a perfectionist or pushing ourselves through negative emotions, feeling bad that we're never doing enough, that that's gonna make us productive. But it does the opposite, it's a trick. I used to be really hard on myself and I used to think that was one of the reasons I was successful. I only learned later that I was successful in spite of being hard on myself, not because of it. I thought it was pushing me to greatness, but guilt or this desire to be better than we really are is like a giant anchor that we're trying to drag with us. If we could cut the anchor of this emotion, we could run free and unencumbered by actually feeling good. I'll give you some examples. If you're having a really bad day, maybe you yelled at your wife or your spouse and they're upset with you and you feel bad and you think, I should have done better, I could be better. In that moment, how productive are you? Very little. I can't get any work done. If I'm beating myself up because I did terrible at my job performance and I'm thinking, I'm terrible, I need to be better, we're not good that day either. Well, let's flip it around. Let's say you're having the best day ever. Let's say it's 84 degrees and you took care of your kids and you took them to school and you got to see your mom and give her a hug and then you went into work and you had a really uplifting meeting with somebody and then you got to get on a podcast with Santi and you just feel like it's the best day of your life. On that day, what can you accomplish? Many things, your energy is over the top. So when we feel like we're our best, we can perform like we're our best. When we are beating ourself up and saying we should be better, we think that's gonna make us better, but it actually brings us down and we do less and worse. So this is the most productivity sapping emotion, it's the emotion of guilt and we have to cure it. And I've got a cure for you, it's a very simple thing. that it's a practice I do every single day. It's the one practice I don't miss. Every morning I start my day by writing down three things I did well the day before. Our brain will always tell me, you messed this up, you did that bad, you could have done this better, that's the guilt. Well, if we just go unconscious in it, we'll then... Develop more of this. I should have been better. I could do better or things could be better So every day I counteract it and I sit down with a piece of paper and I just say what did I do? Well yesterday and I'll wait until I come up with three things that were really good that Immediately starts to change my mindset to I do things that are pretty good all the time And then I look at other people and I say, know what? They do things that are pretty good all the time And then I start to affirm and then what I see them doing well, they're affirming back in me what I'm doing well, as I do something good during the day I'm patting myself on the back, all of this is an upward spiral of feeling really good which means my productivity goes through the roof and it just takes five minutes to sit there and say what did I do well yesterday. Matt, you just mentioned a few things that are easily linkable with work and workplace, right? And I want to elevate this with your experience as a CEO managing a very successful company. And how do you see these moods and overall emotional avoidance bringing things to the workplace like perfectionism, micromanagement, firefighting, Is this just mood? Is part of the personality? Can your book and your teaching help overcome some of the things that are widely recognized as not great things at work? Yes. Out of 470,000 companies in the state of South Carolina, our real estate company was named the number one business to work for. and we've been in business since 2009. So this is our 17th year of success. We've been on the Inc. 5000 list, not the Fortune 500 list like your company, but we've been recognized as the sixth fastest growing company in the state. And the four years that we applied for best business to work for, we were in the top 10, all four, and number one, one of those years. It does start with a mindset of the leadership. So leadership has to have a mindset of positivity and hope and optimism and seeing the best in others. But you only do that if you see the best in yourself. And I'll give you an example. Yesterday I was talking with one of the clients of our company and he had all these suspicions. that these people were out to get him and that they were bad and that their intentions were not right and that they had done things that were wrong. And those suspicions that they were bad are reflection of how he sees himself. But he doesn't know that because he's unconscious to it. So as a leader, if you have a leader who's suspicious that all the employees that work there are bad and that they don't do enough and that they're not pulling their weight, how does that make those people feel? really bad. Yeah, and then they think I'm not respected here. And then they think, what if one of them was kicking butt and was actually staying late and doing a bunch of extra work? And then they get this feeling that the boss thinks that they're not good enough. Well. then now they're like, well, what's the use? I just won't put in extra work. And so they decide not to put in extra work. And then somebody sees that they're slacking off and they're looking on YouTube and Instagram all day instead of doing their job. And they're like, well, why should I put in extra work? That guy's not doing anything extra. And the whole culture starts to deteriorate all because the leader of that department. had an issue where they didn't think that they were performing well enough. And then that then reflected onto the way that they talked to their other people that worked for them. And then the entire culture can just spiral into negativity and lack of production. I went to Tony Robbins business mastery in Amsterdam. And I went back when he was in Las Vegas and he said the chokehold of any business, the one thing holding every single business back is the psychology. of the leader. And I thought, boy that's pretty bold claim. But the more that I've studied this, the more I've seen it's true. If the psychology of the leader has holes in it, if it has issues, if there's some negativity there, it will bleed into everybody. So all I did was work on my psychology to try to get myself into the highest emotions possible. That then bled down to the next level of leadership, to the next level, to the next level, to the next level. And now we're one of the best places to work in the United States. Congratulations, Matt. Let's get a little bit spicy about workplace. Do you think there are companies or leaders that retain and promote? grumpy managers for the sake of compliance or keeping people at bay? mean, do you think that companies keep, how can we call that, whips in companies just to make sure things are done with compliance? I think for sure that some leaders make the mistake of thinking, yeah, I know that person's an a-hole, but they drive results. And I've seen it myself. I had one of those leaders that worked with me. I thought he was driving a ton of results because he was super hard on the people that worked for him. And then what ended up happening, and I was the guy, I was like, well, yeah, he's kind of an a-hole, people complain about him, they say that he's not being fair, but look at all the results we're getting. And then what ended up happening was mass turnover. We lost a lot of people. Turnover is the number one biggest expense of any company and there are many studies that show that the loss of people is your biggest expense and if you don't, if that's not something that you believe, just do some research on it. So, well, he might have been incrementally driving results in the short term by cracking the whip. Ultimately, the loss of the culture and then the turnover of key people was far more costly than what we gained. So I've got now people who are very good at compliance. They just do it in a kind way. And then if somebody doesn't isn't compliant and they're causing harm to our clients, we try to coach them. And if they're uncoachable, we say you can't work here and cause harm to the world. That doesn't mean that we don't care about you. It just means that that's not the type of business we run. Matt, if you open the internet or the news today, it tends to be quite negative. Unfortunately, think that, unfortunately, the media and news business has turned into drama as the probably unique way of gathering attention, which is quite sad. But for people that is in this loop of I open Instagram and I see these, or I go to the news and I see the war in the Middle East right now, in other parts of the world, what is a good way to break out this vicious cycle that social media, you mentioned it before, social media, the media business and news, it's permanently bombarding us with? reduce it. Reduce one input. And this is another action item that we can do right now. We are overstimulated, we are over served. And yes, the most addictive news stories are negative. And there's a psychological reason for this. Anything that's going well that isn't going to derail us and harm us, we tend to ignore because it's not harming us, it's not hurting our survival. But anything that could kill us, we get intense emotion on. Anything that could cause massive harm, massive disruption to our life, we have to pay very, very close attention to it because of our survival instinct in us. That is why the news is negative. It's a business. It's a for-profit business. And our attention goes to the acute negative things that could harm us. And any puff stories about how great things are, the puppies that are kissing children and like somebody that did something nice for somebody, we're like, that was nice, but we don't tune in for it because it doesn't affect us. So the news has to be negative, has to, even though there's more good things happening in the world than there are bad things. The news just focuses on it to sell news. So stop, delete the app. Don't look at the news, just don't. I haven't tuned into the news in over 10 years. And my wife was like, you're not going to be informed. And then I came in and the news was on and our two year old is staring at the TV because my wife is like, no, it's the morning show. It's actually really positive and uplifting. it's quadruple homicide reported yesterday and it's showing dead bodies on the screen as my two year old's looking. And I'm like, honey, we can't put this on TV and give these impressions to our kids. So she stopped watching the news. And then her sister's very upset. She said, well, how are you going to stay informed? And I said, anything that's that massive like we go to a war you'll tell us about it and guess what we knew the day that we were at war that the United States was at war with Iran we knew it immediately because everybody is talking about it but I didn't have to be plugged into a daily negativity creator So just delete one input. I have deleted every social media app off of my phone. None of them increase happiness, all of them decrease happiness. It is a fact. There is not a single positive happiness creator from social media because it's all comparison and we're comparing everybody's successes to our failures. So we got to get out of that. what the Harvard just did the longest study of happiness that's ever happened. It was a hundred year study. They watched children from age zero on up. They determined one thing increased happiness more than anything, more than your health, more than the amount of sleep that you got, more than how much money you had, more than how much power, success you had. The one thing that increases happiness is real quality relationships. If you're in poor health and you can't even walk, If you have good quality relationships, your happiness will be better than somebody who has perfect health and has low relationship quality. What does social media do for relationship quality? Very little matte. It cuts it. If I spend all my time obsessing over fake stuff in the internet world, I have no time to connect with my children. If I'm always looking at my phone, who am I looking at in the eye? Social media is a detractor of happiness. So my recommendation here is stop. Just stop. Cut the inputs. Get connected to real life. You know what, Matt, I couldn't agree more with you. There is something I did recently and it returns a lot of happiness to me. I'm a big Reddit consumer, right? I like Reddit because it's the only place on the internet or one of the few places where you can see real humans writing real stuff. But at some point I noticed my entire feed was US politics. And one good day I thought to myself, well, I live in Europe. I live in a beautiful country and it's nothing against the US, right? Why am I living my life like I'm living in the United States? Right? Why do I, you know, I felt somewhat like I was at some point really living in the US and nothing against the US, beautiful country and everything. But it was not my reality. I was tainted. I was completely contaminated about what the president said today, what will he say tomorrow, what he tweeted and whatnot. So I deleted all these feeds. I deleted all of um them 20, 30, 40 feeds. That was the best thing I have done probably in the last six months for my own sanity. I go through memes, I go through all this stuff, things that I'm passionate about, food and all these things, and I got rid of all these likes. Thanks, Matt. Great, congratulations. that was a conscious choice. And we were talking about conscious happiness. You were conscious to this type of feed is making me feel worse. And then you took action. Controversial, not controversial question, spicy question. What do you say to people that comes to you and say like, hey, how can you be happy with everything that's going on in the world? Yesterday was a quadruple murder you said before in our state. How can you be so happy? What do you tell to these people? that it's my job and it's your job. There's so many people that have said this exact statement. think that it was Gandhi, said, if you wanna make the world a better place, look in the mirror, or that was actually Michael Jackson. He said, look in the mirror and make a change. But happiness starts with us, the improvement of the world starts with us. So when I am a bright light and I have to protect it, I have to protect my light. I look at all the, there's so many, there's so many bad things to concentrate on. When I concentrate on all the bad things. then that darkens my light. And then when my light is darkened, I'm so heavy and caught up in everything that's wrong that I don't have the capacity to give energy and positivity and uplift somebody who's also in the darkness. When our light goes out, we're out of service. So it is our job to protect our light, to protect our joy, to protect the love and compassion and empathy that we have. So when someone else is drowning in the darkness, we can pull them out. and then make the world a better place. We cannot do that from negativity. Now I'm not saying to ignore problems. I'm on the board of Make-A-Wish South Carolina. These are children that are literally fighting for their lives that they didn't cause these cancers and brain tumors and things that they're fighting for their life for. you can be involved in causes that matter to you. And I don't go into it. with negativity, go into it with positivity, which is why I love Make-A-Wish, because these kids are having the worst experience, their parents are having the worst experience, they live in hospitals, and we're saying, what's one thing that would make you really, really happy? It was crazy. The research shows that children that have a wish to look forward to, receive a wish, and then have fond memories of the wish afterwards, have improvement in health beyond the ones that didn't. Matt, role play. You take in over a team, okay? The team is on a very low level of morale, negativity, and it's not going through a good moment. You have four weeks to change the mood of that team, to brighten up this team. How does your four-week sprint look like? Marcus Buckingham wrote a book called First Break All the Rules and in that book he said that morale or culture is created by first autonomy. Usually really, really low morale situations have a micromanaging or a you do what you're told culture. And the ones that are highly autonomous where the employees are given a task or a goal, it's this, I believe that you can hit this goal and then I'll coach you or give you any support that you need, give you anything that you need to accomplish it. But I want you to use your genius to figure out how to. capture that goal, those are gonna be the happiest employees and the most productive. So the first thing I would do is I'd start with autonomy. I'd get together with the team and I'd figure out what are we trying to accomplish? How do you see the best ways to accomplish this? Have your ideas been heard? Have they been listened to? What are the things that we need to change? And let each person in that team start to tell me what they would do. And then give them some leash. Give them some rope to go do it. The second thing that creates happiness and morale is personal relationships. So in a workplace, cultivating personal relationships, you can try to manufacture it, but it usually happens when you have like-minded people together. So what we wanna do is we wanna find the bad apple. If we got a pretty tough culture, there is someone that everyone will point to and say, that person's a jerk. we need to find the one that they say isn't the nice one. I would not immediately fire, I would coach. And if that didn't work, we'd have to remove them. But this is toxic. It's one bad apple ruins the bunch. Once you take the person out that they no longer feel safe around, they can start to feel safe again. And what does that look like? It's the one that's always stepping on other people to get ahead, the one that's taking credit where things aren't deserved. And then everyone thinks, well, how can I get ahead if they're gonna allow this kind of thing to happen? So we have to find the people that act that way and remove them no matter how productive they are. Those are the two things that I would start with. Matt, one for the families and parents. Kids are pure joy, but sometimes they can be a bit stressful. Let's face it. Okay. You have four kids, if I'm not wrong. You have four. You run two businesses, two companies. How do you protect yourself and how do you protect your mood to not reflect or project your stress? Because I'm sure you also have stress. Project your stress into your kids or... blame them, you know, which happens. Sometimes it happens, let's face it. Sometimes it's happened. How do you protect your kids and don't let them absorb the potential negativity that you might have on a tough day? It's a great question. And sometimes we're exhausted and it's late at night and we still need to make dinner and then help with homework and do bath time and read books and we just don't have the energy for it. And then two of them are fighting and then they were like, why can't you just get along? And then we snap and we yell at them like all of this, this is real world, this is real life. Again, going back to what I said about happiness, happiness is the quality and the strength of relationships. So for me, the most important relationships are my relationship with God, and then with my wife, and then with my children, and then with coworkers and friends. So I already am saying the relationship with these children is more important than my work. To me, what that looks like is turning my phone off when I get home. I like to turn it off on the drive to the house. Just off. No one can call. It is off. And if I do it before I get home, my mind starts to let go of all of the work things because I can't even look at the work things anymore. And it starts to get into this is relationship time with my children. And as I get home to my children, now love is spelled T-I-M-E. m We can't spend time with them if we're still thinking about work or opening our email or constantly checking these notifications that show up. So because I can't do that, this is the other thing we do, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday are no screen days. No TV's allowed to be on. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, no iPads, no phones. And you would say, well, what the heck do you do? It's gotta be boring. Man, they help me cook. We cook dinner, we shoot baskets, we go for walks, we play games. This builds really strong relationships with your children and then it doesn't become so stressful. They know you and you know them and it becomes really a big source of joy. That's amazing, Matt. Let's do five rapid fire questions. All right? Number one, one happiness habit you think is overrated or overhyped. fake positivity, fake it till you make it, put a smile on your face even when you don't feel like it, doesn't work. Hmm. It is completely wrong. If we have negative emotions in us, we have to extract what those emotions are trying to tell us. Those emotions are trying to help us. There's something that's not right. We have to deal with it. instead of fake it till you make it, instead of put a smile on your face and ignore and suppress and push all that stuff down, it doesn't go away. We push it down and it either shows up as physical pain, like disease or pain in the body. or it shows up as in a burst where we explode out on somebody later. yeah, do not suppress emotions. When you don't feel good, grab a pen and paper and journal out, why don't I feel good and what can I do about it? Number two, one habit that sounds trivial but quietly transforms people's days when they stick with it. Gratitude. Gratitude sounds trivial. Everyone says have a gratitude practice, count your blessings. You cannot overdo gratitude. Gratitude is the foundation of all the highest emotions. So I recommend, this is how I start my day. I stole this from Rhonda Byrne. When my left foot hits the ground in the morning, I say thank. When my right foot hits the ground, I say you. And I walk through the house saying thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. When I sit down with my first cup of coffee, I say a prayer to God and I thank Him for everything that happened the day before. I just say thank you for all these different people I got to see and meet. Santi tomorrow, I'll be saying thank you for Santi and his amazing show and his great audience that we got to talk with. And then before every meal, every meal, by myself or not, I say a prayer of thanks that there's food on my plate, that my day is good, that the people in my life are here. So this is when I wake up. when I sit down with coffee, three different meals. That's six different times of gratitude. And you would think gratitude's trivial? Just try to say gratitude six times a day and see what happens to your emotions. 3. If you could ban one phrase people use about their mood or mental health, what would it be? if I could ban a phrase. I wouldn't, I just like to open people's eyes when they say things. people, I walked outside the other day, I had an MRI, and we walked outside and the weather was warm. And I said, man, what a great day. And the guy that did my MRI was like, yeah, it's so gloomy. And I wasn't saying what a great way and a trivial way, I actually thought, boy, it's nice that it's warm out, it had been cold. I just want, just every word that comes out of your mouth is a portal into the way you're seeing things. So I would want him to open his eyes to the reality that he's seeing the world gloomy when other people could be seeing it as beautiful. Four, what is one belief about work that you had to kill to become happier and a more effective CEO? that money will equal happiness, that success will equal happiness, that significance will equal happiness. I think we all have to follow that thought. It was ingrained in us. just, it may be US more so than Europe, but this thought that the successful or the happy are on every car commercial, every watch commercial, it is media, we are... we are brainwashed into thinking that if you get successful, you will live the good life. um once I did, I became very successful, but I didn't have all the happiness. And then I realized, oh, those two things are not synonymous. That in fact, if all you do is chase success, significance, and power, you don't have time for the relationships that create the happiness. So that's the belief you have to kill is that the more successful you get, the happier you'll get. you'll get happier as you study happiness techniques, not as you chase success. And number five, when you're in a bad mood or stressed and you have only five minutes before a critical meeting, what is your intervention? What can you do to change your mood? This happens, right? This is real life. You uh get a pretty stressful meeting, maybe somebody quits or you get a bad email and you're checking your email and you got some bad news that maybe a deal went sideways and then we've got to go meet with somebody and be on our A game. So if I have five minutes, the motion creates emotion. So the first thing we want to do is we want to make ourselves big and strong. I wouldn't want to continue to cower and... get in this small position and with shallow breathing. So you sit up, you try to pull your sternum up just a couple of degrees. This is a confidence pose like Superman would sit. And you take big deep breaths. and I would breathe for probably four of those minutes and just breathe as deep as I could. This is gonna pump my body with oxygen, which will change the state of being. It'll change your mind, your brain chemistry. And I'd spend the last minute praying for the best outcome I could have with the next meeting. I'd pray for the people there. I'd say, God, give me the strength. to give them what they need, to say what they need to hear, to help them in any way that I'm possible. I will be your instrument in this meeting. And I would go and have the best meeting I could knowing that I had done everything I can in five minutes. After the meeting, I'd need to go deal with the thing that's upsetting me. Let's wrap things up and give one for the listeners. For people that is on this negative thoughts and cycle, the world is too broken to be happy. What is the smallest experiment you want them to do in the next 24 hours to test those beliefs? I don't know that we can change those beliefs in 24 hours. But if we feel pretty negative right now, just know it is the things you're focusing on. What we need to do is we need to start focusing on more positive things. So for me, the greatest minds in happiness science and emotional intelligence, they've... taken all of their knowledge and they've put it into books and they've made it very organized. So what I would do is I'd go on the internet and I would buy a book from a happiness expert and then I would commit that I'm going to read it for 10 minutes a day. That one book will make you give you some things that will shift some of the ways you're thinking and then you do it again. So it's a 10 minute a day habit for the rest of your life. to continue to study how to be the happiest version of you. In one year, you'll be happier than you were the year before. In a decade, you'll be happier than anyone you know. In two decades, you may be one of the happiest people on the planet. Speaking of happiness and books, how can people find yours and how can they get in touch with you? Yeah, The Best Place is the book I wrote, Good Mood Revolution, Igniting the Power of Conscious Happiness. It's available everywhere online, bookstores. Amazon is a very good place to go and grab it. through that book, you can really get connected with my work. I also have a website called matoneal.com and that's another way people can reach out. Thank you so much, Matt. It's been an incredible 40 minutes um of happiness. And if I'll take something away from today's conversation, it's definitely that happiness can be practiced and that... you feel the way you project your life and the way your thoughts are projected. So a lot for me and for the audience for sure to do in the next days, weeks, years to practice that skill. Matt O'Neill, thank you very much for being with us. Thank you, Sati.