In this podcast your host Loree Draude, former Navy combat jet pilot with decades of experience leading teams in the Navy and at Google, Facebook and Silicon Valley startups, and to stories about developing leaders and teams to reach peak performance. You’ll be inspired by World Class guests and learn strategies, tactics, the mindset and skill set needed, so you too can develop supersonic leaders and teams. here’s your host, Loree Draude..

Loree 0:34
My next guest is Eric Karpinski, my business school classmate, Eric has been bringing positive psychology tools to workplaces for over 10 years. And he is publishing a book called put happiness to work seven strategies to elevate engagement for optimal performance. And the book is being published by McGraw Hill and has been endorsed by other amazing business authors, including Adam Grant, who says if you’re looking for something more energizing and meaningful than employee engagement, start here. And Daniel Pink, The New York Times bestselling author of win and drive, and so I hope that you’ll check out his book and I hope that you enjoy our conversation on today’s podcast. I am here with Eric Karpinski, my business school classmate, former follies, fellow cast member, and also an amazing coach and speaker about happiness. In fact, Eric is publishing his new book put happiness to work seven strategies to elevate engagement for optimal performance. And so I thought we’d just start by asking, what exactly do you mean by happiness at work?

Eric 1:45
Okay, that’s a great question. You know, I, when I talk about happiness, Loree, it is really the experience of all positive emotions, right? So, so feeling the joy and, you know, ecstatic joy counts, but so does feeling satisfied or content. So does being proud or feeling like you belong or feeling valued. So kind of any emotion that feels good, I consider that as sort of the umbrella of happiness. And then when we start talking about work, you know, some people are like, well, what, why are we talking about happiness at work? Why does it matter? Yeah. And my answer to that is, happiness and engagement are actually really closely related. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of ties and engagement has been talked about for the last decade or so. By I don’t 70 75% of organizations talk about engagement and their employees engagement, because it matters because there’s the research is incredible, that shows if players are more engaged, if our teams are more engaged, they’re more productive, they’re more profitable, people stay longer, our customers are happier, it cetera. And so so there’s this focus on engagement. But the problem is, we’ve been investing for the last decade, we’ve invested billions of dollars into engagement, and really haven’t made much difference. The the gold standard, gallops evaluation of engagement, has stayed exactly within 5% of where it was 20 years ago, kind of going up kind of going down. The problem is we’re just doing it wrong. People don’t care about their engagement, what they care about what everybody cares about is their own happiness. And so when, when we talk about oftentimes, when leaders talk about engagement, they talk about the productivity and profitability I talked about earlier. Or they say, well, engaged, teams are loyal, and they’re committed. And they’re, they’re willing to put in the extra effort. And they’re willing to go the extra mile. And, and and all that, of course, when people hear those descriptions of engagement, what they say is like, you just want me to work harder without paying me more money.

Loree 3:52
Yeah, that’s not so incentivizing.

Eric 3:54
There’s no motivation for them. And so what I suggest is that we change how we think about engagement, and how we talk about engagement. Because if you look at engaged people, they are feeling one of or several of inspired. They’re feeling excited and enthusiastic. They’re feeling proud of the work they’re doing. They feel like maybe they feel like they belong, where they feel like what they’re doing really matters. Right. So instead of focusing on engagement, and trying to get people engaged, we should really be focusing on how do we help people feel these what I call activated positive emotions. Yeah, we can help them feel enthusiastic and inspired and that they’re valued and that they’re an important member of the team. Now, we’ve got their attention, right, because it feels good. Yeah. And so if we can change how we talk about it, not what it what the benefits are of the organization, but what the benefits are to the people. And by the way, the organization the team is going to get benefits because we’re going to reach more goals. Now. We’re having Buddy pulling the same direction. And it’s a win win win for everybody. Awesome. Yeah,

Loree 5:06
you talk in the book about hardwiring behaviors? What do you mean by that?

Eric 5:11
One of the big things that we’re talking about in the books, there’s seven strategies that that we know both help happiness and help team engagement. And within those strategies, there are dozens of exercises and habits, etc. So I like to step back away from the hardwire, just to explain in first, I think of it as kind of an action buffet, right? There are dozens of these things. And if you if you spread them out on the big buffet, right, there’s dozens of things, we can do little habits, we can do personally habits, we can do one on one habits, we can do in group settings, and there’s enough of these, you don’t have to do them all it really importantly, we just need to find there’s a read about them, learn about them. And then pick the ones that sound exciting to you as a leader, or that you think would really fit well with your team. And then try them out. Right, it’s a, you know, take take a little taste of part of the action buffet. And then if you like it, your team likes it, well then take a lot larger helping and actually start to, to integrate it. So yeah, and importantly, you know, everybody’s different. everyone reacts to things differently. You know, science is great at telling us what the majority of people what will work for the majority of people, but it won’t tell us what’s going to work for you and your team. So find the ones that sound excited, try them out, use yourself and your team as a laboratory. And if something doesn’t work, that’s okay. There are plenty more opportunities, plenty more tools and things to try. And then when we start talking about hardwiring, so once we’ve got a couple of those going, what we really want to do what’s essential, you know how it is when you read a book, and you’re like, oh, you’re really cool and inspired, or you go to a workshop or a training and you and you’re all excited about the things you want to do. You come and you have this flurry of activity, and you try to do a whole bunch of things. And then things get busy. And it’s easy to fall back to the way you used to do it. So what’s essential and the way that that I designed this in the book, and just how I talk about it, we need to develop habits, habits, individually habits, so there’s a lot of habits that each of us can spend three, four or five minutes a day, kind of rewiring our brain doing little habits to find the good stuff and to experience, then there’s habits that we can do in our one on one meetings with our key team members. And, and then there’s habits that we can do in group settings, right in meetings or in when anytime we get the whole team together. And the idea here to hardwire something means it starts to become automatic, that we do it. And we and obviously it takes a little more work to do it the first time and then the second and third time. But once you have started to do it, it becomes a pattern in your in your mind and in your brain actually rewire your brain to be expecting that we do that activity. And that’s essential for making long term change. So everything I talked about is so many of the things are how do we integrate this into either every day or every week, and then stick with it for a month, a couple months, and then it becomes automatic and and then it becomes like, Oh, hey, we’re gonna do you know where you didn’t ask me that first question, or we didn’t do that connecting exercise at the beginning of our meeting this week, you know, and people will restart to remind you that you forgot. And that’s really when you’re in the hardwired kind of place like, Oh, you know, no one. Most of us don’t go to bed without brushing our teeth. It becomes it’s so automatic. We don’t even think about it. It’s part of our thing. So so that’s really what we want to think about is how do we hardwire that, and that’s what that’s that’s how we make long term change.

Loree 8:46
Yeah, I love the food analogy. By the way, thank you always get my attention. So

Eric 8:53
sad with the pandemic happening as it is. There’s not a whole lot of buffets right now. Yeah, just remember,

Loree 9:02
fondly,

Unknown Speaker 9:04
to buddy.

Unknown Speaker 9:05
I also

Loree 9:06
found it fascinating. You talked about the two paths to happiness, I guess they are kind of the two types as well as the hedonic happiness and demonic happiness thinks big words. So could you talk a little bit more about the differences with that

Eric 9:18
with those two types of happiness hedonic, and is it means you’re pleasure seeking and you want to avoid pain and discomfort, it’s simpler to understand, which is just if I want to be happy, that means I should maximize how many pleasurable experiences I’m having, and make sure that I’m comfortable and that things are pretty easy. And I want to minimize the amount of pain and suffering and, and challenge that I’m facing. Because I just want, I want things to be easy and fun and happy. And that’s fine. It’s a fine strategy to go about life, but it’s, but it’s also one that it gets stuck, you get stuck because every time you get something new, you adapt to it. So you’re constantly looking for The next yummy meal or the next faster car that makes you feel cool or, or even the next partner or wife or you know, it’s such as like, Oh, this person is not bringing me as much happiness as they did before, maybe I’d be happier with someone else. So there’s this constant seeking of new things and new people and new new experiences in order to feel happy. And that’s a trap. So we call that the hedonic treadmill. You’re like, constantly needing more and more, and I’m happy for a little while. But then I’m used to it, and I go on. Yeah, that’s hedonic. And it’s it’s kind of a trap. The other one you demonic is really happiness that’s got a core of it. That’s about meaning. That’s about mattering. That and this is one where as positive psychology, people and and organizational psychology, we want to focus a lot more on how do we create eudaimonic happiness and eudaimonic happiness, you’re willing to forego some of the short term pleasures and ease in order to do something that’s meaningful? Right? In fact, there’s this something we call Kelly McGonigal calls, the stress paradox, that if we’re going to do things that are important to us, we’re gonna feel some stress, because it’s not always gonna go the way we want, or we’re gonna worry about it not going. And that’s okay. That’s okay. Yeah.

Loree 11:21
I think you actually talk about stress and negativity as tools. You know, for happiness. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because normally you think, oh, negativity, that seems like the opposite of happiness? How can that be helpful for happiness?

Eric 11:34
Yeah. And I think, you know, there’s a chapter in the book about stress, there’s a chapter in the book about negative emotions, and how, how could we can use them for engagement and happiness. And on the stress side, you know, stress has got such a bad rap. Everyone’s like, we got to avoid stress, we got to manage stress, we got to stress this part of us. And we evolved the stress response in order to overcome challenges, right, when your heart starts beating faster, when you’re when you’re starting to breathe faster. That’s, that’s get your body getting ready to act. And to overcome some kind of challenge. Now, it can be overdone, it can put us in this sort of freeze and run away place. So what what the scientists call a threat response. And that’s where a lot of the negative stuff happens. But what’s great in the last five years have seen an explosion in amount of research, talking about rethinking stress, talking about seeing the value that stress brings, can’t bring. And that just by seeing the value of it, it changes how we respond to stress from this threat response to something we called a challenge response. And in a threat response, we get overwhelmed and our and our arteries shrink, and it starts to be really unhealthy for us. And our brain doesn’t really work as well. And we want to run away. We want to go to the fridge we want to go whatever our physiological response to stress is that we want to distract. But what’s really neat is there are several different tools for saying hey, I’m stressed right now, this is actually going to help me feel this energy. This is excitement. I’m excited about overcoming this challenge and how it helps us move toward the challenge, rather than away from it. And just looking at our blood system and our and things. Our arteries are open. And so it’s a much healthier way to approach stress and much more productive because we actually don’t run away we go towards it. Yeah. And so so do it from a stress perspective. That’s, there’s a lot of neat stuff that allows us that gives us the power back instead of us responding and reacting. Yep, overwhelmed. Oh, my God, run away to Wow, this is tough, but I know that I have the power to do it, or at least to start moving in that direction.

Loree 13:47
Yeah, it reminds me of weightlifting, like you’re not going to get stronger muscles,

Eric 13:51
if you don’t put stress on them by lifting weights. And by, you know, putting that additional stress on it. That’s what makes you stronger. Exactly. You’re actually ripping the muscles a little bit and then your body builds them back. stronger. Yeah, same thing. Similar thing was stressed. Like, we need to feel it. And then we need to say okay, this is that. But this is important enough to keep going. Yeah, finding meaning in what you do is one of the big paths to going towards challenge, changing how you think about it, even just inventorying your resources, right? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed at first. But then you’re like, wait, what, what else do I have here? I’ve got I’ve got my own strengths and abilities. I’ve got my colleagues down the hall have done something similar to this than before. I thought I only had a day but if I really need it, I could probably take two days to do this, you know, all those resources that can help us switch the gear. Yeah. Don’t stress negative emotions to are one of those things that we none of the things that I talked about is about being happy all the time. We need negative emotions. Actually, when I first started studying this 15 years ago, I was like, This is so cool. If I know How to Be happy that I can be happy all the time. And I don’t have to feel sad or angry or disappointed. And of course, that was a very naive reading of the research quickly here that, look, if we’re gonna live and we’re going to love and we’re going to try to do things in this world, we’re going to be disappointed. Sometimes we’re going to be angry, we’re going to be frustrated. And there’s a lot of really important information in those negative emotions. When we feel one of those things, that means something’s getting stepped on or something’s not working. And we can sort of understand more what’s important to us by what’s making us feel these negative emotions. It’s really good to say, oh, not about I need to get rid of this yucky feeling, which so many of us default to, to say, Oh, I’m really angry right now. I’m really sad right now. What is it that’s doing and what am I feeling? And I talked in the book too, about differentiating unnecessary negative emotion, meaning something that happened from the outside world, and I got it. You know, it’s just it’s here. Yeah. And what are the tools to sort of work with the real disappointments in life, the real hurts in life, the real versus the gratuitous negativity, which is, when we take something that happened to us, like, let’s say, we didn’t get a promotion? All right. Well, that’s, that’s disappointing. We should feel that we should let that in. Yeah. And then now the internal language that we have, which is mean, that means I’m not good enough, it means no one likes me. It means it means that I’ll never get there, you know, and soon I’ll be homeless and and maybe have to live with my parents, or what are we going to do with my right, you go to catastrophize ation, and Yep. And those are things that we can reduce, right. So there’s necessarily negativity, we need to work through it. gratuitous negativity, we can reduce it pretty safely. And you know, not not always and it’s okay to feel sad sometimes. Yeah. But there are things that we can do. And that’s, there are tools that are pretty important for how do we change? Yeah. So both of those, both stress and negativity are essential. understanding them is essential to how to be happier. And happiness itself is not about happy all the time, if we can just find three or four times during the day where we tweak a little bit of happiness instead of where we were. Yeah, that’s all it takes to find ourselves more engaged and more energized, and, and happier.

Loree 17:20
Yeah, I’d love to hear some more examples of that. Just because, you know, like, right now, a lot of my clients are just maxed out, like they’re so stressed at work, it feels like, you know, now that there isn’t that dividing line between work and homes, and so many people are still working from home, they just feel like they are always working, how do people find time to incorporate some of these exercises or tools so that they are tapping into that happiness more frequently?

Eric 17:45
Yeah, I think one of the centerpieces of I’ve worked in so many environments where there’s so many demands, so much both as, you know, both being brought in from the outside and from myself. None of this is like, takes hours to implement, right? All of these, all of these activities, all of these habits are a few minutes. You know, maybe when you wait just after you wake up, or just before you go to bed, a few minutes at the beginning of a one on one meeting or at the beginning of a group session together. We’re all busy. And so we need to but but if we’re conscious about creating space, planting seeds for some of these positive positive emotions, they happen. And you know, and again, it’s not like we, we did a thing. And so we’re all supposed to be bouncing around the room happy. Oh, we did a thing. We planted some seeds. Sometimes it’s gonna work. And that’s huge. And sometimes it might not. And so we can play with it or try it again.

Loree 18:41
Yeah. How about for leaders of teams? Who are you know, they’re managing their teams through this difficult time? What might be some ways that they could help their teams with tapping into your incorporating more happiness exercises into their work? Like I love that example about doing one on ones? with people on your team? Can

Eric 19:02
you talk about that? Sure, sure. One of the one of their favorite things that, that a lot of people have found a lot of value as is on their one on each. And you know, a lot of us meet with some of our key people once a week or so, you know, sometimes more, but once a week, just kick off that meeting with, hey, what’s one good thing you’ve seen a teammate do this week? Right? What’s one thing that you’ve seen someone else that we work with? That was it doesn’t have to be like the most awesome world changing thing, but just what was something that they did that was right, or that was fun, or that was cool, or that was just effective? Right? And what that does is it does a bunch of things. First of all, it starts off your meeting, talking about something positive, which is always a good idea if we can talk about good things that are happening at work, things that are making progress. It also helps that employee and if you that person, and if you’re doing this with several of your teammates, of your team members. It’s having them look over the course of their week for what’s what’s Something that good that happened. And what something good that someone else did. And by doing that, they start to activate this neuro pathway that say, Hey, what’s good right now? What What good things have happened? Let me focus a little energy on that. Yeah. And so it starts to rewire their brain to find the good stuff, especially if you do it consistently, over the course of a couple months as to Hey, look, every meeting we get together, I’m going to ask you, what’s one good thing you’ve seen someone do this week? Yeah. And so. So then after the first after the second time, after the third time, now, they’re actually going to be saying something good happens. And they’re like, Oh, this is something I want to bring to Loree. Right? This is something I want to bring, and tell him because that was a good thing. So now they’re, they’re scanning, hopefully scanning their whole week for all this is a good one, I’m gonna bring this, here’s another good one, I’m gonna bring this. And then it’s also wonderful for you, as a supervisor, as a manager, you’re hearing all of these things from your people. And then when you talk to those other folks, you can say, Hey, I heard you just did a great job on that presentation, I heard that you were very thorough in your analysis, I whatever it was that you’ve now got that appreciation. So there’s, there’s multiple ways that this one activity can create and spread more positive emotions.

Loree 21:11
Yeah, I love encouraging people on your team to be looking for the good things that are happening, like encouraging that perspective is really healthy.

Eric 21:20
Yeah. And it connects to one of the most well known sort of happiness habits, which is gratitude and just taking five minutes in a day, writing down three good things that have happened to you that day, or, or three good things that you can think of in your life. Yeah, that trains your brain to look for it. And what I love to do, and I suggest in one of the options, is, just have one of those be something at work, or someone at work, right, dude, do two of them that are just generally about your life, and then think one that’s like someone at work and you start to, you start to recognize that there’s so many more good things happening than you might know, if you didn’t look for them. Yeah, that’s so true,

Loree 21:58
what he’s talking about happiness important now.

Eric 22:03
Well, you know, the pandemic has is done quite a job for all of us, in terms of creating much less happiness for a lot of people. And some people, it’s fits great. But a lot of people are having a lot harder times. And so I think what there’s a need for more happiness. And as you said, people that are working from home, and it’s in their home life and their work life have all mashed together, and they don’t really separate it. We need to be proactive about our mental health. And we need to be proactive about creating space for things that help us feel good. Things that help us feel better. And importantly, one of the biggest paths to happiness and positive emotions are each other. Yeah. And connections. And so it’s, we can do that over the screen. If we do it in person, though, we’re often physically distance, we’re often wearing masks, it’s hard to read. And so it’s really important now to find ways to keep creating those social connections. For those of us that are working at home or working in a space, like how do we make sure we create space, even in a safe way for social connection to happen? And we’ve got a whole strategy around that, and, and what are some of those things we can do in it, making sure that I’ve talked to several sort of leaders who are so sad that people come on to zoom meetings, and they all turn off their cameras, and they’re all sort of quiet in the back. Now, you don’t have to have all of your meetings with cameras on I don’t want to say that people, some people, introverts in particular, it gets tiring to do that. Yeah, for them to constantly be on. However, pick a meeting or two each week with the team where you are doing that. Because that ability to see other people’s faces to hear what they’re doing. And then potentially, you know, even doing something proactive, to help create connections. You know, one of my favorite activities is a friend of mine, Scott Crabtree, who’s, who works at a company called Happy brain science. And he he calls this a Pecha Kucha presentation. All right, let me explain what it is.

Loree 24:18
Yeah, it sounds like some kind of ritual involving fire and I don’t know.

Unknown Speaker 24:24
Yeah.

Eric 24:26
So, so what it really is, is just it’s a 10 slide presentation, that you ask everybody to put 10 photos of them of their lives, things to some that people will know. And some that people won’t know. But 10 photos, don’t doctor them anyway, don’t put text on them anything, just literally the 10 photos. And then the beginning of a meeting. One person goes up and shows their presentation. I tell little stories, but you only have 10 seconds per slide. Right? So it’s not like you can get into really complex stories and take 20 minutes, you know, it’s a two minute exercise. Hey, this is what I like, I love to be in a band. And here’s my bandmates. And, you know, this is my dog, Ralph. And this is what we, you know, do together. And, you know, this is this is my family. And here’s one of our favorite things. And just that simple thing will cause so many people to catch little hooks on things that that they didn’t realize about you that then you can create conversation later. And you can understand more about people, and what drives them and what their interests are, that can create a lot of cross functional cross connection. I love that, as an exercise, it’s sort of an example of the kind of things that you can do when you’re being proactive about it. And I think the pandemic also is such an opportunity. We’ve broken all the social scripts about work, not all of them, but we’ve broken a lot of them, right? Lots of organizations that, well, we’ve never been productive, and we worked at home. Well, guess what? We’ve just got an experiment. And we can do it. Yeah, it’s not 100% perfect. Maybe it took a little while for us to get there. But we can be productive. So as we as vaccines start to get more widely distributed, as we start thinking about what new work is going to look like, let’s be proactive, and think how do we create a happier, more engaged way of interacting with each other, and of doing our work? I think this is an opportunity to go pull out those favorite books that you’ve had that you’re like, Oh, I really thought this would be good. Or use my book and all the ideas, they’re there. Yeah. And say, we can create a better tomorrow, let’s be proactive about as we start to think about, are we coming back to an office? Or are we not? There’s lots of tools that can be used in a virtual way. And lots of tools that we can that work even better when we actually are, are in a shared space together, at least for part of the time. So this is I am super excited, like one of the silver linings of of this pandemic, is that it? It’s shaking things up enough. As we go forward, we can we can build it the way we want to build it. Yeah, build work the way it works for everybody, where there’s win wins, where we’re being thoughtful of each other, rather than doing it the way it always has done. Yep.

Loree 27:14
So my last question for you is, I know that you have gone to Burning Man for many years. And I’ve never been and I’m curious, you know about did Burning Man, your experiences with Burning Man have any influence on this book and you writing this book? And I mean, this could probably be a whole separate podcast, but like, what might be some top lessons for leaders that you’ve taken away from your Burning Man experiences?

Eric 27:42
Yeah, no, it’s, that’s a really good question. Because it’s Burning Man. So I’ve gone Yeah, it’s 19 years now. And the first the first few years was just as an escape, right, and just go into a different world where there’s no buying or selling of anything, and where the the default greeting is, hello, and you’re awesome, and what, whatever you’re doing is cool. But then I started really organizing theme camps, which are kind of like the groupings of people that then offer some gifts to other people have at Burning Man, and so many leadership lessons in that because one of the biggest roles I’ve done for the last decade, is I come my campus called pink heart, and I lead the build, right, so we were building a space for 100 people to camp and for 1000s of people to come visit. So we have literally 1000s of guests over the course of the week, coming in and enjoy sitting on our couches and we give 1000s of gallons of cucumber water away and 1000s of servings of coconut ice cream and and people meet there and people connect there. And for me what’s it’s an intense crucible of leadership opportunity. Because I’ve got 25 to 30 people, we’ve got three days it’s 120 degrees at the peak of the day. Sometimes there’s wind gusts and dust storms that wipe everything out and that blow things down if you’re not being careful. And and I’ve got a group of 30 people that are engineers and artists and and software people and and bank like all kinds of different experiences and mechanics and people that are good with their hands and people that aren’t good with their hands and people that are creative and not creative and and I’ve seen so many camps blow up and completely fall apart during that really intense period because they just don’t do it or people weren’t. So for me, it’s it’s been neat to see so many things that I talked about in the book. I you know, I do share one Burning Man story, but most of almost all of the lessons that I talked about, they’re finding helping people find meaning in what they’re doing. Making sure that you’re appreciating what people are bringing, helping people find their strengths and really get a chance to use their strengths in tapping into the meaning of What we’re doing right, we’re creating a space for people to meet and connect and find each other and feel loved and feel like they belong somewhere, you know, and I get to coach all of the people that are coming, I make sure that I’m connected with them well ahead of time I figure out what the plans are. And then really spend a lot of time dealing with problems, but mostly going forward and thinking about how thinking about how it’s going to be so that they, they have a good experience, and, and they contribute to something that’s beautiful. Awesome. Very cool. Yeah, it’s fun. It’s a neat experience. And I wouldn’t if I didn’t have that leadership opportunity, things, I probably wouldn’t still be going. Yeah, that’s kind of that ends up being my favorite part of the week is the build and the camaraderie and the ability to go from a flat dusty, nothing to a beautiful, interactive place. That’s where a whole, you know, for 10 days. Very cool. You know, I think I guess I would end with how important now is that we really have the opportunities now. And I know that a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed with work and things. But when you have opportunities to start thinking proactively about what’s going to happen next, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. We don’t know exactly when it’s gonna happen. But how do we start planting these seeds? For more positive emotion? How do we start planting, doing some of these and start integrating some of these short tools, these little tools that we can that just turn our minds positive little more often, if we can just do those little things week, you know, for a few weeks, it’ll become become habits. And then it’ll really will really be in a place that

no matter when we, if we go back to the officer for any office now start wearing masks less or whatever, however, it works out, finding ways to connect, and to help people feel more inspired and more excited and like they belong. That’s a great thing to do for people, for your teams. And hugely importantly, it’s a great way to then help everybody move towards the goals towards the things that we want to achieve. And, and one of the things I love about the book is 80% of it is good for anybody. Right? We can all learn the tools and either for ourselves or for our colleagues at work, we can help make things happier. And then that other 20% is like how do we do that as a leader as a manager? And how do we expand on those abilities? And that’s what I want to do I there’s a lot of really cool stuff. And so I want to inspire people to try to try some of these things out, see what works, no question, there’s going to be something in there that works for you and works for your team. So give it a give it a shot.

Loree 33:00
What a lovely way to end. So again, your books, your book is called put happiness to work. Seven strategies to elevate engagement for optimal performance. And is it available now on?

Eric 33:14
It’s a Yeah, it’s available on Amazon. It’s okay, pre ordered. So March 9 is the official launch. Okay, great. And so but you can pre order it now. And it’s, you know, Bill on Amazon and Barnes noble and books a million and indie bookstores. So anywhere that you like to buy books, you can, okay, at least anywhere online. And then the books are almost printed in there. They’re going to be distributed here pretty soon. Okay.

Loree 33:40
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Eric. It was really fun talking with you. You’re one of the happiest people I know. So it must work.

Eric 33:49
I appreciate that. Well, well, I don’t I have lots of those times that are where I’m anxious and stressed and all those things. There’s a knowing that there are tools to lean into and, and that it’s okay to feel sad and depressed sometimes, like, it’s okay to be there. And when you’re done processing that there are lots of things you can do that to try to help bring yourself and and people you know, into a better place.

Loree 34:12
Absolutely. Awesome. Thanks, Eric.

Unknown Speaker 34:16
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai