Brad Eather (00:02.121)
Hello and welcome to the Selling's Creative Podcast, a podcast exploring creativity's role in sales and business. I'm your host, Brad Ather, a digital communication sales strategist, helping business owners and sales teams deploy digital communication strategies. The nature of sales is a funny one, where the gratification of a closed deal is often short-lived and our minds quickly shift to our next opportunity. It's this pursuit of constant progress
that on the one hand forces us to reflect on our past performances, but not necessarily on ourselves. If you've ever noticed that when things are going well outside of work, your sales results generally take care of themselves, but when things aren't going so well, your sales suffer too. Well, today's episode is all about assessing success in the things that aren't tied to our sales results. Today, we're gonna be exploring
what it means to be happy. My next guest is a happiness researcher, a TEDx speaker, a soon to be father, an advocate for helping people and workplaces master the skills and science of happiness. Welcome to the show with a big smile, Declan Edwards.
Declan Edwards (01:22.06)
Brad, I appreciate it man. Thank you for the G-Up. Thank you for the great intro.
Brad Eather (01:26.623)
No worries at all. Now Declan, I think for many people, the question of happiness is quite a complex question to face. And I've shared a little bit of my backstory with you and the fact that I haven't always been happy. So naturally I've spent a lot of time considering this question. And quite honestly, I don't think I found some type of an answer until I discovered what it meant to be truly unhappy. So
I'm wondering what led you to be so curious about happiness in the first place and how would you answer that question, what is happiness?
Declan Edwards (02:06.604)
Yeah, look, they are big questions, you know, particularly that question of what is happiness. We've been arguing that for about three and a half thousand years as a species. So I'm going to try my best to add to three and a half thousand year old debate today, the concise answer on this show. But before we get to that, I'll leave a little teaser for people listening. I'll share my answer to the first question, which is what got me interested in happiness. And the answer is because I spent so long chasing other people's definition of happiness.
I spent a lot of years in my life being what I now look back on as a human chameleon. Like I was really good at being what I thought others wanted me to be. And I achieved a degree of success from that. And what I found pretty quickly, and I'm thankful I realized this quite early in life, was that the success felt somewhat empty when it wasn't connected back to my definition of happiness and success. Like what matters to me in life? What is a happy life on my terms, not someone else's?
And it wasn't until I started doing that and looking inwards and going, okay, well, what is happiness by my definition in terms? What does it mean to be intrinsically motivated by my values and my character strengths rather than extrinsically motivated by reward and accomplishment? And you mentioned at the start, that's very common in sales.
It wasn't until I started asking those bigger questions and getting some great support from amazing mentors and coaches and people who've spent their careers studying the skills and science of happiness that I went, wow, I wish I learned this earlier. Like I wish I got exposed to this sooner. I wish everyone learned it. And off I went and found myself studying positive psychology, which is the scientific understanding of what makes life worth living.
over the years of doing that, so that's now been over a decade that I've dedicated my career and my life to studying the science and skills of happiness. Over that time, I've grappled within myself with the question of, well, what is a happy life on my terms? And where I've landed is happiness for me is when I'm simultaneously deeply content with who I am and where I am in life. So it's more of that contentment, steady state happiness. It's more about having a good relationship with myself. It's more about being grateful for the life I currently have.
Declan Edwards (04:15.738)
and at the same time I have something meaningful and that I'm working towards and that's more of your traditional like dopamine driven happiness, it's future driven happiness, it's accomplishment focused, that's still a big important part of my personality and what I've noticed in myself is if I lean too heavily into that future focused happiness, know, I get stuck on the I'll be happy when trap.
But if I go too much into the, let's cultivate happiness right now, I do feel a little bored and a little stagnant with life. And so for me, happiness is this, I almost described it like a little happiness cocktail, like my recipe for a happiness cocktail is equal parts, current happiness and gratitude and contentment and future happiness and achievement and accomplishment. When those come together, I'm living a pretty happy life.
Brad Eather (05:04.467)
Yeah, I relate to that because as I said at the beginning, I haven't always been happy. and when I, I went through a similar journey where I had to self assess what, what I wanted out of life. And I think that for me, it's that same thing. Happiness is actually.
The contentment is the baseline and that's what I'm aiming for now. And happiness is everything else that, you know, taking those moments to be present and understanding what it means to be present and finding happiness in those moments. That's something that, you know, I haven't spent 10 years focusing on it, but it's been a, it's been a real self-reflection for myself as well. It's just like,
having those benchmarks and assessing that what my benchmark actually is, is to achieve contentment. And then I can focus on everything else around it.
Declan Edwards (06:05.817)
Mmm.
I love that. I mean, to be honest, like on that point, you know, I said, I'd try to give a concise answer to a three and a half thousand year old question. Where you and I have landed is not all that indifferent from what the Greeks were talking about three and a half thousand years ago. You know, there was the hedonic happiness camp and school of thought, which was the secret to a happy life is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. You know, this was the sex, drugs and rock and roll like high achiever lifestyle was the secret to happiness. And I think a lot of our modern capitalistic society is still kind of built on that idea. Like if you achieve enough success, then you
will get happiness as a byproduct. So that's the hedonic lens. And at the same time, there was the Greeks on the other side of the table going, no, it's eudaemonic happiness, which is a word that means contentment and contribution and connection. It's a slower type of happiness, but it's a steadier baseline. It doesn't come and go as quickly. And they were arguing with each other. And I don't know, I feel like for me, and sounds like similar for yourself. I feel like the girl in that old El Paso taco ad where they were arguing over should we have hard shell or soft shell tacos and she ran out and went
Brad Eather (06:40.309)
Mm.
Declan Edwards (07:07.726)
Well, why don't we have both? And then the whole town threw a party, right? They had a massive fiesta. I feel the same with happiness. I'm like, well, why can't we have contentment, connection, contribution as our baseline, as you said, and then sure, top it up with excitement, enjoy and accomplishment and achievement. Like it doesn't have to be one or the other. We can bring these expressions of happiness together and hopefully throw a big party and fiesta because of it.
Brad Eather (07:29.405)
Hmm.
Brad Eather (07:34.271)
When you were talking about Greek philosophy and stuff, my immediate thought went to the world today and how complex it is. And we're no longer just dealing with the problems that are in front of us. We have information and things. We have screens and people trying to get into our consciousness at all times of the day.
And you mentioned dopamine as being one of those things that we chase. I'm wondering how you view happiness in that lens of digital media and having those signals of dopamine, you whether it's a little notification popping up on the phone and how do we actually manage that so that we can bring ourselves back to the present?
Declan Edwards (08:26.542)
you
Yeah, man, look, dopamine is I'm gonna call it cheap and easy happiness. We can get it fast and free and fleeting these days, but God, it goes quickly. And we know there's something called hedonic adaptation, which is where the thing that bought us a little boost of happiness over time brings us a little bit less happiness. And you can test this, right? you, for those listening to this, go get your favorite ice cream after this podcast or this evening, have the first teaspoon of it really mindfully and intentionally, like really let's savor it and enjoy it.
Brad Eather (08:33.909)
Hmm.
Declan Edwards (08:58.058)
and you're like, my god, my happiness is so high, right? This is the best thing I've ever had all day. I'm so stoked. By the time you're at your fifth or sixth teaspoon of it, it's still enjoyable. Don't get me wrong, I'm not someone who's going to come here and say, hey, ice cream is now not enjoyable, but the enjoyment factor is less. It's amazing how quickly we adapt.
And we see the same thing with people's careers or with their sales targets, right? They go, I want to do 5,000 a month in sales. And you get there and you feel really good for a moment. And then you start hitting 5,000 months consistently. And all of a sudden, it doesn't feel like an accomplishment or a joy anymore. It doesn't get the dopamine factor it once did.
And so it means if we only build happiness on dopamine, we're actually setting ourselves up to have a diminishing return on investment, just by nature of our brains. Like there's nothing you could do differently unless you went, I need to keep upping the ante. I need to go from $5,000 months to $10,000 months. need to have the one scoop of ice cream now. I need to have 10 scoops of ice cream. it's, we're always chasing the next thing if we only build happiness on dopamine. And you're right, so much of our modern society is built on dopamine.
A lot of advertising is built on can we give people a quick fix of dopamine? A lot of social media, part of its addictive nature is it's built on dopamine. And so what I encourage people to do is one, really intentionally be mindful of where you're getting dopamine kind of hits to you without your choice. So best thing I can recommend everyone does, go into your notification settings on your phone, turn off notifications for every single app except for phone calls.
The reality is if something urgent was happening in your life, someone would call you about it. That is the only thing that your phone needs to notify you about.
Declan Edwards (10:35.382)
All the other apps can still be there. But if you don't have notifications on, you get to decide when you use them. You get to decide when they're important. You get to decide when to tap into the dopamine rather than you being the product. Right? So that's something that if I click my fingers and everyone did it, that's something I recommend doing for managing dopamine. The other thing I recommend doing is put more intentional effort and time into cultivating the other, you know, neurochemicals and hormones that help with happiness. So rather than dopamine focus on how do we nurture oxytocin?
Well, that's nurtured by connection, genuine meaningful relationships and connection and human to human moments. How do we stimulate serotonin? Well, that's by mindfulness and calm and present moments and trying to slow down in a busy, busy life and a busy, busy career. So if we start going, well, I'm going to look after those as well. How do we get endorphins? Well, we exercise more, right?
All these things that we know are incredibly good for our minds and our bodies and for our wellbeing. If we put more focus on those and we mindfully and intentionally limit where we're getting dopamine, you'll find that that blend, that little happiness cocktail that happens in our brains tends to get a little bit more balanced.
Brad Eather (11:46.965)
So when you were talking there, you mentioned at the beginning of the discussion, this idea of skills and happiness, like the skills of happiness. And when you were talking right there about all these different oxytocin and dopamine and managing all these things, it sounds quite challenging to balance.
Declan Edwards (11:56.268)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brad Eather (12:12.037)
all those things. And I didn't really understand what you meant by like developing skills of happiness, but maybe what you were just talking to there is, is part of it. Do you want to define what you mean by like learning the skills of happiness? And yeah, how is, how do you practice that?
Declan Edwards (12:31.446)
Yes, sir. Well, man, like, let's look at this in the context of any skill, because you're right. Like, I just mentioned all these scientific terms related to happiness, which if you've not learned the skills and science of happiness, it's going to seem challenging and hard and intimidating. Just like if I was to come along and say things like arpeggio, treble clef, like semi quaver quaver, that's intimidating and scary to someone who's never studied the skills and science of music. But someone who's listening who knows music goes, I get that. I know how to work with that. Or if I said, hey, you know, like,
with your pivot foot, know, two foot layup, reverse layup, that's scary, intimidating skill sets for someone who doesn't know basketball. But if you know the skills and signs of basketball, all of a sudden that becomes manageable. It is the exact same when it comes to managing our mind and emotions. The more we learn about the skills of happiness and the science of happiness, the more equipped we feel to manage our happiness effectively. And when I talk about the skills of happiness, I specifically talk about the skills that have historically been called soft skills.
We're now trying to call them human skills or happiness skills. So let's look at even some of the ones I just mentioned there that help with managing those neurochemicals of happiness. I said, you regular exercise. Well, there's a lot of skills involved in regular exercise. We need to have discipline. That's a human skill. That's a soft skill. We need to have habit building skills. That is a soft skill. Right? We need to have intrinsic motivation rather than just extrinsic motivation. That's a human skill. If we then go, well, what about connection with other people? Well, then we need to nurture the skill of empathy.
We need to nurture the skill of communication. We need to nurture the skill of emotional intelligence so that we can pick up on other people's emotions as well as our own and manage our own effectively. Like all those things I mentioned that said, hey, if you want to balance the neurochemicals that lead to happiness.
and not just rely on dopamine, you need to do these things. Those things require you to work on these human skills. And I think for most people, in fact, I saw a Harvard Business Review article a while ago that said for most people, 90 % of their professional development and learning, be it through, you know, primary school, high school, university or trade school or college, whatever you do. And then on the job learning, 90 % of people's learning in life is dedicated to technical skills to be better employees.
Declan Edwards (14:47.964)
10 % is spent learning the human skills that make them better human beings. That is insane to me, right? We need to completely flip that on its head. I dream of a world where 90 % of people's education and time is spent learning the skills that make them better human beings. And then they top it up with 10 % that makes them better at their specific chosen craft, like their technical skills that make them better at their job.
I think we're going have a much better world if we get them. Hell, I'd even settle for 50 50. It doesn't even have to be 90 10. But the fact that only 10 % of people's time, energy and resources of their learning goes into how do I learn the skills that make me a genuinely happier and better human being is wild to me.
Brad Eather (15:29.589)
Because soft skills, I think soft skills are so important and there's a lot of distraction at the moment around AI. And I actually think that effective use of AI is not in technology. It's actually in developing the soft skills.
Declan Edwards (15:44.632)
Yes, sir.
Brad Eather (15:57.727)
that allow you to communicate more effectively. So you mentioned empathy. So how do I translate empathy into a communication through AI that's gonna land more empathetic, more empathetically. And I think that those inputs that you're talking about, those soft skills, it's actually the people who are gonna be highly effective using AI are the people that are not chasing the technology, but rather,
chasing those soft skills that you're talking about. Because then you can actually make something meaningful at the end of the day, know, technology is technology, but we're dealing with humans and humans haven't changed. I'm wondering if you've had, I don't know if you've personally been using AI or been exploring some of those concepts within that context at all.
Declan Edwards (16:53.686)
Yeah man 100 % so...
Look, we've been using AI now in BU at the happiness college that I run. We were pretty early adopters. I think it's coming on two years that we've had a professional subscription to chat GBT. And we've set up specific agents and channels within it to help with different tasks in the organization. is radically expanded the amount of impact we're able to make. But to your point, we always say with our team start with human end with human, right? Like it has to start with human skills, it has to end with human skills. And the AI does the help in the middle. We even named our AI I gave I'm not gonna lie, I gave myself a day off
after this one, because I was so proud of it. We called it like WALL-E, like W-A-L-L-E. We called ours HAPI, like H-A-P-E, because we run a happiness college. And so now we refer to it like, hey, HAPI, can you help me with this? It's like, sure, I'm happy to help out. And I was like, okay, man, you deserve a day off. That was genius. But to your point, man, about like, we need these human skills, particularly in this era of AI we're coming into, we have historical precedent for that.
Brad Eather (17:33.461)
Yeah.
Declan Edwards (17:50.656)
If we go back 100, 150 years to the industrial revolution, let's look at what happened. Over 50 % of the workforce at the time was employed in what we call work of the hand. They were in manufacturing and laboring in factories, or they were in agriculture. Over 50 % of the workforce. Machinery comes along, industrial revolution comes along, where now, I think it's like three to 5 % of the population is working in work of the hand. Like it is a dramatic drop. And at the time everyone's like,
my God, we're going to lose all the jobs, all the jobs are going to disappear. Now don't get me wrong, some industries, some jobs disappeared, but we made a hell of a lot more new jobs off the industrial revolution. And I would argue we made better jobs. We got people out of dangerous factories as much as we could, particularly in like, you know, developed nations and whatever term we use these days. We gave people more safe jobs, more secure jobs, we created more wealth, the jobs are actually paying higher.
And then we entered what we call the era of the majority of the population working in work of the head. So this is knowledge specialists, I would argue you and I both largely work in work of the head, right, like people who have a specialty knowledge area, lawyers, doctors, etc, etc. And work of the head and knowledge was now the main commodity. I believe we're now entering another industrial revolution where AI and machine learning is going to it's probably already to be honest, doing work of the head better than we can as humans.
I cannot compete with the knowledge that AI has. Neither can you. don't think anyone listening to this can, and it's only going to get better. We're going to have a lot of jobs change as a result of this, but my hope is we're going to enter the next era of human development where the majority of the workforce is employed in work of the heart.
Work that is specifically related to human skills, compassion, empathy, connection. And I think that's going to lead to a lot of good in the world. We just need to go through the messy transition point in the middle first. And to your point as the people who know how to use the technology and the tools, know how to leverage AI for its work of the head, but they bring the heart element, they're gonna be the ones who thrive in this next era.
Brad Eather (19:57.097)
I love that. Work of the heart. I love it. doing a little bit of research, background research on you, your thesis was on how happiness is defined and measured in workplace settings. And we, I believe we sort of covered off maybe what happiness means at the individual level, but I'd love to get into what happiness means in a workplace environment when, you know,
Declan Edwards (20:16.558)
Mm.
Brad Eather (20:23.413)
There's multiple stakeholders involved and it's a lot around workplace culture. You mentioned a few studies around salespeople and skills of happiness, but maybe more broadly, talk to me about what happiness in the workplace actually means. How do you bring it all together?
Declan Edwards (20:46.956)
Yes, Yeah, look, I'll answer this in two ways. I'll say first and foremost, I'll use two frameworks for this that came out of my master's thesis study. First framework is there are three distinct parties that we need to keep happy if we're going to have thriving workplaces. And the three parties are, we need to keep, I always ask this in my comments, I'm like, who do we need to keep happy? And people go customers and clients. I'm like, yes, customer experience, like customer happiness and client happiness. That is an important part of a successful business and a good workplace.
Who else? And they're like, well...
maybe employee experience and employee happiness. I'm like, yes, that would be great. Like employee experience, employee happiness, very important. A lot of workplaces fundamentally do not have a business if they don't have people in the business, particularly if you're in a service-based industry. Like if you are in a service industry, your people are literally your business. So let's make sure that they're feeling good and doing well. And then the third one is key shareholders, stakeholders, be it board of directors, executives, if it's a publicly traded company, people who own stock in the company, we need to keep them happy as well.
Now if we look at those three, I would argue that for the last 100 or 150 years the priority order has been keep shareholders and stakeholders happy at all costs, even if that means everything else falls apart and we're looking at short-term gain. We have a lot of workplace at the moment that I think are falsely incentivized to focus on short-term wins over long-term progress and we know that because they have to report to their directors on quarterly performance targets.
right? And fundamentally, if we're going to make a better society in a better world, you can't do that in three months, right? So we are encouraging short term thinking, even within our political leaders, most democracies, they're not thinking about what's the impact I'm going to have with my policy decisions now on the next 50 years, they're thinking, how do I get reelected in three to four? Right? So like we unfortunately have incentivized short term thinking, and we've incentivized to keep shareholders and stakeholders happy at all else. Then our second tier has been, well, we need
Declan Edwards (22:47.568)
is keep customers happy. Customers are fickle, they've got more choice than ever. It's a global economy. They can go anywhere, keep them happy. And then maybe if there's any time, budget or resources left, we'll look at employee happiness. What I found from my research is that is fundamentally backwards. It's completely backwards. And what I've found is examples of organizations that have gone the exact opposite way and they're like, hang on. If we upskill and support and elevate our people, if we have incredible employee happiness,
they tend to leave a really positive impact on our customers and on our clients, right? Like we all know when we walk into a workplace and people fundamentally hate working there, you can feel it as a buyer, right? So it makes a customer experience then. And that's our second priority. And then because the customers are happy, they refer more, they come back for more business, they don't churn as much. We also have lower overheads because we're not replacing our staff as much. We know there's high recruitment costs or mental health leave or psychosocial hazard leave legality wise.
And so then all of sudden our shareholders and stakeholders are pretty happy because the company is more profitable. And so my argument, my challenge to a lot of leaders is like, hey, ask yourself, of those three parties that need to be kept happy for a thriving organization, what order are we currently prioritizing it in?
And the best way to check is look at where you're putting budget. Look at where you're putting time and energy and resources. If an organization does not have a dedicated employee experience budget and strategy, I'm telling you, you're not prioritizing it as the top of the level. So we need to start with that. So I'll say that first and then the second framework I'll show. yes.
Brad Eather (24:24.031)
Just to clarify, are you talking about...
Brad Eather (24:30.549)
So there's going to be some businesses that are smaller in nature. Where was your study focused in terms of employee headcount? Just so that we can put a line into the sand between, because obviously resources are finite and those kinds of things and employee experience strategy is going to be difficult for a smaller business.
Declan Edwards (24:40.034)
Yeah.
Declan Edwards (24:55.448)
Definitely. Yeah, well, difficult, but still accessible. And I'll share how it's still accessible. So my study looked at all, I did a meta review and meta analysis of all studies that were done on English speaking, Westernized capitalistic countries, because that's specific sort of culture with work. Over the last, I believe it was 10 years, we went back to 2012, still made the cut. So it must have been closer to 15 years. And headcount in industry, anywhere from like five employees through to all looking at ones that had tens of thousands. So.
What we found the way to make it scalable and accessible regardless of size is there was a Gallup study that was done that found that if you put, it came out at about 2 % on average, 2 % of your payroll back into the employee experience, you will get a really good return on investment. What they found was for every dollar on average, you'd get $2.67 to $3.27 back.
in reduced costs, reduced overheads, higher performance, higher sales, better productivity, lower mental health, etc, etc. So if I came out and said, Hey, there is a stock on the market at the moment that for every dollar you put into it, you're going to get $2.67 to $3.27 back over the next year. Everyone would run and buy the stock.
That is what the research says when it comes to investing employee experience into workplace happiness. There's of course a limit to that. You can't just then go, okay, we're going to move our entire budget into that. The limit was about 2 % of payroll. So let's say for round numbers, because I'm a simple man, let's say your payroll is...
between all of our staff, pay out a million a year in salaries. Okay, well, you need to be ready to be investing about $20,000 a year specifically into improving the employee experience. That might be learning and development strategies, that might be wellbeing strategies, that might be burnout prevention, whatever it may be, I need to carve out 20 grand a year. And when you're already paying a million, like that is for a lot of businesses, that's one of your biggest overheads is your staff. Like one of your biggest costs is your staff.
Declan Edwards (26:50.74)
why would you not put 2 % back into optimizing that asset and making it feel better and do better? Right? So that's the argument. And that scales no matter size of business, right? If you're paying out a hundred million in salaries, if you're paying out a hundred thousand in salaries, 2 % is your target. And that's sort of like on average, you can go up to about three and still get pretty decent results. Much past three, the data starts to say it's a diminishing return on investment.
Brad Eather (27:18.933)
Well that's an actionable strategy for anybody out there in charge of a financial budget.
Declan Edwards (27:25.134)
Yeah, and if you want help with it, we've actually, we've built a free calculator that workplaces could use. So I'll send through the link so they can use it. You literally plug in, because the real data is it's to be 1 % of staff who are casual or part-time, 2 % for staff salaries who are full-time and 3 % for leaders or executive or key assets. And if you lost them, it would be very hard to replace them.
And so I say, look, for ease and convenience, average it out at 2 % of your entire workforce. But if you want to get specifics for your workforce, we've got literally a free budget calculator. can go, have this many staff who are part-time, this many who are full-time, this many who are executives or key decision makers or key assets. This is rough salaries and that spits out, here is your employee experience budget per year. Use it wisely.
Brad Eather (28:07.113)
So it's a bit of a cliche, the pizzas, you know, giving pizzas to your employees to make them happy. And I'm presuming that's not what you're talking about. You mentioned quite a few things about training, right? Training your employees. What are some practical, maybe some outside of the box things that...
Declan Edwards (28:12.526)
Mmm.
Declan Edwards (28:24.088)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (28:34.889)
businesses may not have considered that would lead to better staff well-being, things that they could invest in.
Declan Edwards (28:41.058)
Yeah. Man, I'm a little biased on this one, I'll be honest, because this is what me and my team actually developed off the back of my master's research. And it's so out of the box that I see so few organizations do it. The ones who are partnering with do it, I think are on the front end and they're pioneers when it comes to employee experience. And that is measure workplace happiness.
And the reason for that is what we measure we can manage. And so it astounds me how many organizations run their people and culture strategy, basically on vibe checks. where they're like, feels good, or maybe this or that, you know, someone came to us and sold us leadership trading. I'm like, okay, well, why are you doing leadership training? Do you know that that's the gap that's making the biggest impact on your employee experience right now? And be like,
Nope, but our competitor did leadership training, so maybe we should do leadership. Like, it's just guesswork. It's wild. There is millions upon millions of dollars being spent on absolute blind faith and guesswork.
And so a lot of my work and what I did off the back of the thesis was like, hey, how do we build evidence-based, fully anonymized staff surveys to measure? And this is the second framework I mentioned, alluded to earlier that I said, what does workplace happiness look like? We found those five pillars of workplace happiness. If these five things are done well, it leads to a fantastic employee experience, a great flow on effect onto your customer experience, and then your shareholders are happy. And the five pillars are high workplace wellbeing,
And we could break that down further because there's seven types of workplace wellbeing. Like I'm sure we don't have time to get into all of them, but it's like physical wellbeing is a bit different to social wellbeing. It's a bit different to financial wellbeing. So there's different contributors to that, but wellbeing first, then engagement, which is one that people have been talking about for like 20, 30 years. And most often it's one that's being measured, but it's the only one that's being measured. Like all the agents go, do an annual engagement survey. I'm like, cool. That is one fifth of the puzzle. If that's all you're doing, it's not enough. Right? Number three is culture, which we're talking a lot more about lately.
Declan Edwards (30:32.592)
includes things like psychosocial safety. That includes things like transparency and trust, vision, mission, values, there's some key contributors to culture. Number four is leadership. We know that has a massive impact on the preceding three. Right, if leadership is equipped and doing well and set up for success, the other three tend to do a little bit better. And then the last one is resilience, which is where we see burnout come in, which is where we see adaptivity come in. It's where we see, you know, in the massively changing world of work that we live in.
where there's all these disruptions and change, do we have a workforce that's able to adapt to change and bounce back in hard times? We want resilience in there too. So those five things needs to be looked after. And if they are gonna be looked after, answer your question of what's something out of the ordinary that workplaces can do, measure it. Measure it effectively because then you can A, see where your gaps are, B, see where your strengths are and kind of brag about that in your recruiting process.
And see, you can measure whether where you invested that money works. So if you do go, hey,
We got our budget, 2 % of payroll, we're putting that all towards pizza parties three times a year. I promise you, you're not going to see a change in those five measurements. You're not going to see a change in those five facts of workplace happiness. If you do the leadership training, do you see a return on investment? Do you see a change in those numbers, particularly in the leadership one? Because if you don't, chances are the leadership training was pretty shit and you shouldn't buy it again. Right? So like for us, so much of what we do at BU Happiness College when we partner with workplaces is give me the evidence first. Like prove it. Let's measure this.
that's put together a strategy. If you're not measuring it, you're relying on faith and blind guesswork and you're just gambling with your budget.
Brad Eather (32:12.339)
You mentioned resilience there as being one of those pillars and for salespeople, often the word resilience is sort of like seen as a badge of honor. You know, we're resilient. We go out and get knocked back when we're doing cold calls. We're just, we're pretty much just the brick wall that shit gets thrown at until we win something. use
Declan Edwards (32:23.726)
Mmm.
Brad Eather (32:39.305)
Boke about a study when we were talking before the podcast about, think it was Sean Acre at Harvard and salespeople who learnt the skills of happiness were 37 % more effective as salespeople. I wonder how, if you've got something that challenges this notion of resilience and maybe how that those skills of happiness play into.
Declan Edwards (32:46.06)
Yeah, yeah.
Declan Edwards (32:55.234)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (33:08.318)
more effective selling.
Declan Edwards (33:10.018)
Yeah, so I'll answer first. Resilience, I think there's a very common misconception about what resilience is, right? We often think of resilience exactly through the lens that you described it of, I can stay strong through the shit times. That's not resilience. That's almost stubbornness to a degree, right? True resilience is I can adapt well in challenging times.
Right, which means I'm able to change my approach. I'm able to bring different skillsets to the table, right? It is not survival of the fittest or strongest, it is survival of those most are able to adapt. That is resilience, right? And so we want to look at that first, like skills for adaptability, and being adaptable in times of challenge and change.
Then when it comes to yes, to your point, you know, the great work by Sean Acre and his team, he wrote a great book called The Happiness Advantage, which I highly recommend if people are enjoying what we're talking about, you'll probably enjoy that book. And he found that to your point, and what you mentioned, salespeople who learned the skills and science of happiness and practice them, I think it was like a 12 week immersion they did from memory. It's been a while since I read the original study.
they found that the result was they produced 37 % higher sales over the following year than the control group who didn't learn those skills. this, know, at first you're like, wow, that's a lot. 37 % sales higher is huge. But then you sit with it and go, it kind of makes sense, right? Because so much of sales is those human skills. Do you have empathy? Can you communicate effectively? Do you have emotional intelligence? Can you connect to the person on the other side and understand their needs and what's gonna help them? Can you form meaningful relationships over the long term?
Those are all the skills of happiness. And they're also pretty essential in selling, especially selling in a way that's ethical and actually enjoyable and human, right? And not sleazy and gross. I think we're past the era of that type of sales, hopefully, in many ways, right? So, yeah, hopefully. I mean, look, I know there's still some clinging onto it with desperate hands. Yeah, so, you my invitation and hope for everyone listening to this is like, hey,
Brad Eather (35:04.607)
Hopefully, hopefully.
Declan Edwards (35:16.81)
learning the skills of happiness is not just going to make you a better sales person. Sometimes people ask me the question, does money buy happiness? And I'm like, I know from the research that happiness skills buy you money. Like they make it more likely that you personally and your workplace does better financially. So why wouldn't we invest into them?
Brad Eather (35:26.047)
Yeah.
Brad Eather (35:34.815)
So the skills of happiness, you described to me prior that there's four steps. And we alluded to it earlier in the conversation that these skills can be applied to anything, whether you're learning basketball or learning music, as we were talking about before. But from a happiness point of view, what are the skills? What are those steps? One, two, three, four.
And how can we apply them to happiness?
Declan Edwards (36:06.348)
Yeah, yeah. So what you're talking about there is the stages of skill development. And you're right, they apply to any skill. Like I would challenge people listening to this now to think of any skill you've learned in life, even something as simple as like driving a car.
Every skill you've learned has followed these four steps. The first step is what we call unconscious incompetence, AKA ignorance is bliss. You just don't know what you don't know. You've never been exposed to it. For example, I've never really thought about till this moment how good I would be at the cello. Like it's just a skill set that I've never really pondered. So in ignorance is bliss, I'm like, I like to think I'd be pretty good at the cello. Who bloody knows?
If I was then go pick up the cello and try it, it's probably gonna sound like shit at first. And that puts me in level two, which is conscious incompetence, where we go, there's a lot I don't know here. There's a lot of skills I've never learned, I've never been exposed to, I've never practiced. My hope when any conversation I have about the skills and science of happiness be added a keynote to the live conference on a podcast.
My hope is that I'm lovingly and somewhat forcefully pushing people from stage one into stage two when it comes to their skill sets of happiness, right? I want people to start the conversation not really knowing anything about the skills and science of happiness, because it's not massively spoken about. It's a relatively new field of research only about the last 30, 40 years.
and I want them to leave the conversation or by the end of this podcast go, shit, there's a lot that I don't know how to do when it comes to managing my mind and emotions. There's a lot of skills I don't have when it comes to happiness, right? Which can be scary and intimidating. I call it the shit phase, that second one where you're like, shit, I'm gonna learn this. If you then start learning and practicing, you'll go into stage three, which is conscious competence. So like you're getting the hang of it, but it still takes effort.
Declan Edwards (37:47.714)
You're like, okay, I can do this. It's starting to work. Still takes a lot of focus, a lot of practice, a lot of consistency. And then eventually we reach stage four, which is unconscious competence, where it's so ingrained in you, where this is embodied wisdom. You can do it by second nature. You do it without even thinking about it anymore. And this is...
you know, the whole reason I started a social enterprise and started a happiness college to teach people the skills and science of happiness was how can I speed up that learning journey? Can we help people go from stage one to stage four?
way faster by learning the right tools, getting accountability, getting guidance, getting coaching, and having a good community around them. And what we found is we call them stage four moments. Sometimes we have members at the college be like, yeah, I just noticed stress coming up the other day. And it was kind of like at a five out of 10. And before it took over, I was able to proactively practice some mindfulness and some presencing skills. I prioritized some time on my calendar for self care. I had some difficult conversations and I set some boundaries. And I'm like, holy shit, those are four skills that a year ago, you didn't know how to practice
at all. And they're like, yeah, I just did it. And now I feel better from it. Like life is still challenging and stressful, but my ability to manage that is so much higher. And I'm like, you didn't even think about it anymore. Like you went out and set boundaries, you had different conversations, you practice self care effectively. You did all that without thinking. That's cool. And so I, like I get so lit up and energized by the idea of like, can you imagine a world and a workforce?
where people just as second nature knew how to practice empathy and compassion. As second nature, they knew how to manage their mind in healthy ways, even when their mind was trying to be difficult and play tricks on them and, you it was difficult with mental health. They knew how to manage their emotional wellbeing effectively. Like, can you imagine what world we would have if that was just second nature to people? That's the goal, right? That's if people can all learn those skills. what a world we would have.
Brad Eather (39:46.933)
It reminds me of a conversation I had with, in a previous podcast with Erin Fairman and she was talking about leadership skills and what you were talking about there with the, with the four steps of the four learning skills to introduce habit, to introduce happiness was a lot of autonomy. And, and she was talking about the idea that leadership needs, you need
Declan Edwards (40:08.238)
Mmm.
Brad Eather (40:14.547)
Well, it was actually talking about motivation, but to be motivated as a person, you need to have autonomy, mastery and purpose. And they line up really well, like having autonomy and the skillset to be able to identify what you need in that moment and bringing it back so that you can continue on with your purpose. I think that's maybe a really key ingredient to if you've watched that previous
Declan Edwards (40:21.539)
Yes.
Brad Eather (40:43.701)
podcast, maybe a really key insight to that autonomy piece. Yeah. Well, we've come to the end of the podcast and I'm really excited to hear your perspective on this question because, well, it's coming at it from a lens of happiness, which I'm excited to hear how creativity plays into happiness. So what is your definition of creativity?
Declan Edwards (40:47.742)
Mmm. Man, I'd agree. Yeah, ends right up my alley.
Declan Edwards (40:58.199)
Mmm.
Declan Edwards (41:13.838)
So for me creativity and when you sent this to me before the podcast I kind of sat with it for a bit I pondered with it because in full transparency Creativity is also seen through the lens of positive psychology as a character strength like there's 24 strengths that universally are recognized as being valuable and We all have a different set of five what we call signature strengths So the ones that were uniquely good at were really skilled out they come second nature to us I'll be honest with you Brad Creativity is nowhere near my top five
Brad Eather (41:26.239)
Mm-hmm.
Declan Edwards (41:44.046)
know any of my top five character strikes. And so when you sent it to me, I was like, I got to flex a bit of learning here. I got to sit with this and sort of reflect on it. And what came to me is my idea of creativity is being able to find novel solutions to things. Right now be that a novel idea for like visual creativity and creating art be it solving a problem in a creative lens. I think if you're able to hone the skill of seeing things in a new and novel way, that is creativity by my definition.
Brad Eather (42:14.495)
Yeah, great. It's really funny that that is, when I originally started the podcast, I wanted to challenge the idea of creativity from an artistic point of view. And there's a reason I send that question out before and say, really have considered this because if you take time to consider it, what I'm finding is that people are arriving at the same...
people that inherently don't consider themselves as creative like yourself are arriving at the same conclusion. And it takes the, what I'm finding, I really think that that definition that you've just provided as well takes, it simplifies it a little bit. And through frameworks like we've discussed today gives you guiding principles that allow you to take steps outside.
Declan Edwards (42:50.155)
Interesting.
Brad Eather (43:10.741)
So if you're following along with everybody's definition of creativity, are, I think we're getting to the pointy end of this and I may even swap up the question slightly differently and phrase it slightly differently in the future. But Declan, where's the best place to get a hold of you if people want more information about your happiness university?
Declan Edwards (43:34.562)
man, a few different places. You know, if you are a podcast person, which I'm assuming you are, because you're listening to a podcast right now, we relaunched our podcast, how to be happy a few months ago. And we've been so blown away by how well it's received. put out weekly episodes that teach the science and skills of happiness. And we also interview people who've gone through the college workplaces that we've partnered with to become happier workplaces. It's become one of my favorite places to have conversations about the skills and science of happiness. So feel free to
go across, follow how to be happy on any of your podcasting platforms, or connect with us and find us on any social media platform. So if you search for Declan Edwards, or I found out recently if you search that happiness guy, I pop up on nearly every platform, which is kind of funny. So put in that happiness guy or Declan Edwards and you'll find me. We've actually just started literally at the time we're recording this, we're four days into an experiment I'm doing, where I've redirected our entire marketing budget towards positive social and environmental impact.
Brad Eather (44:18.741)
Nice.
Declan Edwards (44:34.508)
And we're still trying to hit our growth goals. So what we've done is instead of paying for ads to promote the podcast or our social media platforms and channels, we've just said, Hey, for every follower that we get and every subscriber that we get on YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and to the podcast, we're going to pay, take the money that we would have spent in social media advertising. And we're going to use that to protect a square meter of forest.
We started that four days ago and I checked this morning. We've already protected 228 square meters of forest in the last four days just by people going, I can get behind this.
I hope it works for the right to be honest. This is very early in the experiment. said, I'm going to do this for all of June. If we still hit our growth targets without spending any money on social media ads, and we've protected a bunch of rainforest in the process, I'm just going to keep doing this forever. So I hope everyone chooses to come along and do that and follow us on all the socials, subscribe to the podcast, and then we'll make a positive impact on your behalf in the process.
Brad Eather (45:28.127)
Well, you've taken something marketing, if marketing scene is creative, you've flipped it on its head and done the exact opposite, which in itself is creative. So I wish you the best of luck with that endeavor. Absolutely everybody get behind that. Thanks for listening to the Selling is Creative podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure to like and subscribe. And in the meantime, happy selling.
Declan Edwards (45:40.782)
Thank you.
