Happiness Isn’t a Feeling—It’s a Skill. Here’s How to Practice It.

The following is adapted from The Butterfly Impact.

Happiness is misunderstood. It’s not just a feeling you get when something positive happens to you. Rather, it’s a component of your life that you either strengthen or neglect. Think of it like cleanliness or fitness. You can boost your happiness if you choose to practice it.

Once you have a more complete understanding of happiness as a skill (including the ten different types of happiness), you’ll be able to apply it to all aspects of your life, including the workplace. Approaching your professional life with a refined sense of happiness can help you enjoy work more, sure, but it can also improve your performance and lead to better career opportunities.

What Even is Happiness, Anyway?

What is happiness? Most people don’t spend much time thinking about it. You just know it when you feel it. It is often associated with something happening to you, like receiving a gift, winning a game or getting a new pair of shoes. In the context of work, though, it should be seen as a direction instead of a destination.?

“Happiness is a skill, not just a feeling, and you can strengthen that skill with practice,” says Nataly Kogan, author of Happier Now. Kogan immigrated to the United States as a refugee from the former Soviet Union when she was thirteen years old and started her new life in the projects outside of Detroit. She battled her way up the corporate ladder and became a venture capitalist at the age of twenty-six before building Happier.com, her consultancy, which helps companies with emotional health skills at work.

Think about that for a moment: Kogan built a highly successful business career after starting out in a life of poverty. She could have pursued pretty much anything, and she decided to help people understand the power and importance of happiness. I think it’s awesome, and, like Kellie’s story, an inspiration to make happiness a priority in your own life.

How Does Happiness Improve the Workplace??

Being positive at work can have a ripple effect through a team and organization. It can also lead to increased happiness outside of work, and serve as a force of change in people’s lives in a way that few other emotions can do.

While it often gets overlooked, positivity not only belongs in the workplace—it deserves priority. We all learn about the American right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in grade school. But Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 phrase never seemed to apply to work. Throughout the Colonial Era, the Industrial Revolution, and today’s age of Wall Street profit-seeking and digital productivity, the connection between happiness and work has remained elusive. We often think of them as mutually exclusive: At work? Not happy. Away from work? Happy.

Too often, we let work happen to us. Our calendars tell us what meetings to attend. Our emails tell us what questions to answer. Our team leaders tell us what the priority is today. If we let work happen to us, we often feel helpless and unfulfilled.

It’s all about our mindset. Stanford professor Carol Dweck’s research has taught millions the power of developing a “growth mindset” instead of accepting a “fixed mindset.” One of the most powerful parts of this concept is also incredibly simple: you can change your mindset.

With the power to change your mindset, you can tap into what author Shawn Achor calls “The Happiness Advantage,” a conclusion he’s drawn from more than 200 scientific studies on nearly 275,000 people.

“Based on the wealth of data [the researchers] compiled, they found that happiness causes success and achievement, not the other way around,” Achor writes in his 2010 book The Happiness Advantage. “Happy workers have higher levels of productivity, produce higher sales, perform better in leadership positions, and receive higher performance ratings and higher pay.”

How Can I Practice My Happiness?

According to Barbara Fredrickson, there are ten feelings associated with happiness. Fredrickson is a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina and author of several books, including Positivity: Top-Notch Research That Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life.

Start by focusing on these ten feelings during your workday. To establish a habit of happiness, select one attribute for each day of the week. If that’s too ambitious to start, pick one per week.

For example:

• Joy. A great cup of coffee, a favorite food for lunch, the right song in your headphones—you can find joy through simple moments, if you start looking for them.
• Gratitude. Thank someone for a job well done, or for just being themselves and showing up.
• Serenity. Find ten minutes for peace and quiet and reflection. Listen to a meditation exercise on your phone, if that’s something you enjoy.
• Interest. Learn something new about a teammate or a project or product at work.
• Hope. Peek ahead on your work calendar to find an event or a meeting that you are looking forward to. Or a project or a milestone that is near completion.
• Pride. Share a cool project or outcome with a friend or colleague, or post it to LinkedIn.
• Amusement. Introduce something fun into your work conversation. Start a meeting with a funny story or image or meme. Post a joke to your favorite Slack channel.
• Inspiration. Find a work-related article on Medium or LinkedIn that inspires you and share it with your colleagues.
• Awe. Take a nature break or walk outside, and look closely at the trees and birds.
• Love. You might not think that love has a place at work, but start paying attention to how often this word is used during the workday. Start saying it yourself. “I love that!” is a great piece of feedback on a colleague’s project.

Consider this a list of emotional workouts so you can become stronger in your own happiness. Focus on one one week, and then move on to another. Within months, you’ll notice a marked improvement of your emotional state.?

Create Happiness—Don’t Wait For it to Appear

Happiness isn’t something that will come to you if you wait for it. Rather, it’s something you create, and it takes work to create it. It’s worth all the work though, as it offers tangible improvements to your personal and professional life. Once you know specifically which types of happiness to cultivate in your life, you can start seeing benefits immediately.

Happiness makes you a better performer at work and more successful in your life. While you can’t push an easy button and make a great day happen at work each day, you can start building small habits that infuse moments of happiness into your workday, increasing the chances of having more great days and fewer bad ones.

For more advice on creating and spreading happiness, you can find The Butterfly Impact on Amazon.

Mark Briggs is a management consultant, helping Fortune 500 companies modernize their operations, culture, and leadership by facilitating cutting-edge transformations. Also a speaker, trainer, and consultant in digital transformation and innovation, Mark has worked with groups across the United States, Europe, China, and the Middle East over the past fifteen years. He is the author of three books and a professor of leadership and change management at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.?