August 10, 2015

Entrepreneur and CultureIQ are searching for the top high-performing cultures to be featured on our annual list. Think your company has what it takes? Click here to get started.

It may be a cliche, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true: Beyond a certain pointmoney can’t buy happiness, at least not reliably or sustainably.

The key insight into the nature of happiness for us came when we realized that the quest for happiness was not only the reason that people pursued careers and started families, but was also what guided many of their decisions in day-to-day life. In 2007, we started really looking into the science of happiness to help guide our decision-making for Zappos.com in a more rational way — after all, if happiness was the goal, wasn’t it worth seeing what we really understood about the concept?

Related: How to Hardwire Your Brain for Happiness

By 2009, understanding and delivering happiness had become the centerpiece of both our personal and professional strategies, which is reflected in the mission statement we adopted that year: “Zappos is about delivering happiness to the world.”

Delivering happiness sounds good, but to be effective, you need to know what that actually entails. What makes you happy? What makes people around you happy? Different people have different ideas about what might make them happy, and it’s important to note that people aren’t always on the right track about what they think will make them happy.

Fortunately, psychology has taken up the case of applying scientific principles to understanding what really governs happiness. Psychology used to be primarily interested in figuring out what was wrong with people and making them “normal,” which was used as a proxy for “healthy.” But in the late 1990s, psychologists began exploring what’s now known as “positive psychology” to get a better understanding of how otherwise average people might become happier.

It turns out, there are four key principles that drive happiness across the board. Whatever the specifics of how an individual derives happiness might be, these four key principles remain common:

1. A sense of control

Having a sense of control over your own destiny is paramount to lasting happiness. When this is lacking, people tend to easily give up and feel despair and helplessness, but with purpose and control over their own destinies, people become energized and unlock their talents and ambitions.

A good entrepreneur gives employees, partners and customers clearly apparent control over their own destinies in managing interactions with the company.

2. Perceived progress

It’s no fun feeling like you’re stuck in neutral. The perception of progress is a cornerstone of the path to developing sustainable happiness.

This is why the most successful video games offer unlockable content, achievements and badges and allow for “leveling up.” These elements function to keep people interested and motivated, and to feel as though they’re experiencing a sense of progression.

Related: If You’re Not Happy, Stop Complaining and Make a Change

Good companies will do the same, offering clear and attainable promotional paths for employees and intuitive paths to satisfaction for customers and clients.

3. Connectedness

Humans are social animals. We thrive on connections to other people. In fact, we depend on those connections emotionally as well as physically. Engaged, connected employees work harder and report greater happiness than those isolated in offices or cubes. This is also why it’s important to build a real rapport with customers and vendors.

We have evolved to care about the success of the tribe — make your colleagues and clients part of your tribe.

4. Vision and meaning

There’s nothing wrong with making money, but as we’ve learned all too well, making money is simply not enough. In fact, research indicates that once you reach a certain compensation threshold, your salary becomes significantly less indicative of your overall happiness.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs demonstrates how human motivation evolves rapidly once basic physiological needs are met, leading people to be more concerned with freedom of expression, social status, a sense of achievement, a sense of belonging and other intangibles.

If you’re counting on money to generate your happiness, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Being a part of something bigger and really committing to a vision brings deep satisfaction on a fundamental level. If you can find that sort of vision and meaning and offer it to the people in your life, you’re laying a firm foundation for genuine, long-term happiness that transcends financial considerations.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what it is that you want to do with your life. But taking the time to truly understand what drives happiness will equip you to act effectively when pursuing it — and when delivering it.

Related: 3 Simple Ways to Feel Happy

August 10, 2015

When faced with setbacks and challenges, we’ve all received the well-meaning advice to “stay positive.” The greater the challenge, the more this glass-half-full wisdom can come across as Pollyannaish and unrealistic. It’s hard to find the motivation to focus on the positive when positivity seems like nothing more than wishful thinking.

The real obstacle to positivity is that our brains are hard-wired to look for and focus on threats. This survival mechanism served humankind well back when we were hunters and gatherers, living each day with the very real threat of being killed by someone or something in our immediate surroundings.

That was eons ago. Today, this mechanism breeds pessimism and negativity through the mind’s tendency to wander until it finds a threat. These “threats” magnify the perceived likelihood that things are going—and/or are going to go—poorly. When the threat is real and lurking in the bushes down the path, this mechanism serves you well. When the threat is imagined and you spend two months convinced the project you’re working on is going to flop, this mechanism leaves you with a soured view of reality that wreaks havoc in your life.

Related: 7 Challenges Successful People Overcome

Positivity and Your Health

Pessimism is trouble because it’s bad for your health. Numerous studies have shown that optimists are physically and psychologically healthier than pessimists.

Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania has conducted extensive research on the topic. Seligman finds much higher rates of depression in people who pessimistically attribute their failures to personal deficits. Optimists, however, treat failure as a learning experience and believe they can do better in the future.

To examine physical health, Seligman worked with researchers from Dartmouth and the University of Michigan on a study that followed people from age 25 to 65 to see how their levels of pessimism or optimism influenced or correlated with their overall health. The researchers found that pessimists’ health deteriorated far more rapidly as they aged.

Seligman’s findings are similar to research conducted by the Mayo Clinic that found optimists have lower levels of cardiovascular disease and longer life-spans. Although the exact mechanism through which pessimism affects health hasn’t been identified, researchers at Yale and the University of Colorado found that pessimism is associated with a weakened immune response to tumors and infection.

Researchers from the Universities of Kentucky and Louisville went so far as to inject optimists and pessimists with a virus to measure their immune response. The researchers found optimists had a significantly stronger immune response than pessimists.

Positivity and Performance

Keeping a positive attitude isn’t just good for your health. Martin Seligman has also studied the connection between positivity and performance. In one study in particular, he measured the degree to which insurance salespeople were optimistic or pessimistic in their work, including whether they attributed failed sales to personal deficits beyond their control or circumstances they could improve with effort. Optimistic salespeople sold 37% more policies than pessimists, who were twice as likely to leave the company during their first year of employment.

Seligman has studied positivity more than anyone, and he believes in the ability to turn pessimistic thoughts and tendencies around with simple effort and know-how. But Seligman doesn’t just believe this. His research shows that people can transform a tendency toward pessimistic thinking into positive thinking through simple techniques that create lasting changes in behavior long after they are discovered.

Your brain just needs a little help to defeat its negative inner voice. Here are two simple steps you can take that will train your brain to focus on the positive.

Step 1. Separate Fact from Fiction

The first step in learning to focus on the positive requires knowing how to stop negative self-talk in its tracks. The more you ruminate on negative thoughts, the more power you give them. Most of our negative thoughts are just that—thoughts, not facts.

When you find yourself believing the negative and pessimistic things your inner voice says, it’s time to stop and write them down. Literally stop what you’re doing and write down what you’re thinking. Once you’ve taken a moment to slow down the negative momentum of your thoughts, you will be more rational and clear-headed in evaluating their veracity. Evaluate these statements to see if they’re factual. You can bet the statements aren’t true any time you see words like never, always, worst, ever, etc.

Related: 15 Habits of Mentally Tough People

Do you really always lose your keys? Of course not. Perhaps you forget them frequently, but most days you do remember them. Are you never going to find a solution to your problem? If you really are that stuck, maybe you’ve been resisting asking for help. Or if it really is an intractable problem, then why are you wasting your time beating your head against the wall? If your statements still look like facts once they’re on paper, take them to a friend or colleague you can trust, and see if he or she agrees with you. Then the truth will surely come out.

When it feels like something always or never happens, this is just your brain’s natural threat tendency inflating the perceived frequency or severity of an event. Identifying and labeling your thoughts asthoughts by separating them from the facts will help you escape the cycle of negativity and move toward a positive new outlook.

Step 2. Identify a Positive

Now that you have a tool to snap yourself out of self-defeating, negative thoughts, it’s time to help your brain learn what you want it to focus on—the positive.

This will come naturally after some practice, but first you have to give your wandering brain a little help by consciously selecting something positive to think about. Any positive thought will do to refocus your brain’s attention. When things are going well, and your mood is good, this is relatively easy. When things are going poorly, and your mind is flooded with negative thoughts, this can be a challenge. In these moments, think about your day and identify one positive thing that happened, no matter how small. If you can’t think of something from the current day, reflect on the previous day or even the previous week. Or perhaps there is an exciting event you are looking forward to that you can focus your attention on.

The point here is you must have something positive that you’re ready to shift your attention to when your thoughts turn negative. In step one, you learned how to strip the power from negative thoughts by separating fact from fiction. Step two is to replace the negative with a positive. Once you have identified a positive thought, draw your attention to that thought each time you find yourself dwelling on the negative. If that proves difficult, you can repeat the process of writing down the negative thoughts to discredit their validity, and then allow yourself to freely enjoy positive thoughts.

Bringing It All Together

I realize these two steps sound incredibly basic, but they have tremendous power because they retrain your brain to have a positive focus. These steps break old habits, if you force yourself to use them. Given the mind’s natural tendency to wander toward negative thoughts, we can all use a little help with staying positive. Put these steps to use, and you’ll reap the physical, mental, and performance benefits that come with a positive frame of mind.

A version of this article first appeared on TalentSmart.com.

Related: 11 Things Ultra-Productive People Do Differently (Infographic)