Principles to Predict Success

Regardless of how you define success, I believe there are certain things you can do to create the results you desire. Today I would like to share with you some of the principles discussed in the book The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor.

The first principle is that positive brains have a biological advantage over brains that are neutral or negative. Positive emotions flood our brains with dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that not only make us feel good, but dial up the learning centers of our brains to higher levels. They enable us to make and sustain more neural connections, which allows us to think more quickly and creatively, become more skilled at complex analysis and problem solving, and see and invent new ways of doing things.

How we experience the world, and our ability to succeed within it constantly changes based on our mindset. The second principle therefore is to adjust our mindset in a way that gives us the power to be more fulfilled and successful. There are lots of ways we can work on improving our mindset including meditation, committing conscious acts of kindness, exercise, and utilizing our personal strengths.

The third principle is that when our brains get stuck in a pattern that focuses on stress, negativity, and failure, we set ourselves up to fail. Our society encourages this kind of training and rewards us for noticing problems that need solving, stresses that need managing, and injustices that need righting. Some of the pessimists I know think they are just being realistic, but current brain research shows that looking for the downside, while it might come naturally to us, undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals. The good news is that we can train our brains to scan for the positive. If you literally can’t see the positives in your life, you won’t have a chance to capitalize on opportunities, possibilities and chances for growth.

In the midst of defeat, stress and crisis, our brains map different paths to help us cope. The fourth principle is finding a mental path that not only leads us up out of failure or suffering, but teaches us to be happier and more successful because of it. Studies show that if we are able to conceive of a failure as an opportunity for growth, we are all the more likely to experience growth. Some strategies towards finding the upward mental path include positive reinterpretation of the situation, acceptance, and coping mechanisms that include focusing on the problem head-on instead of avoiding it.

When challenges loom and we get overwhelmed, our rational brains can get hijacked by emotions. The fifth principle has us regain control by focusing on small, manageable goals and gradually expand to achieve bigger ones. To regain control, start with self-awareness, then identify which aspects of the situation you have control over and which you don’t. Next identify one small goal you know you can quickly accomplish so the likelihood of success increases. By tackling one small challenge at a time, we can relearn that our actions do have a direct effect on our outcomes. Small successes can add up to major achievements.

Sustaining lasting change often feels impossible because our willpower is limited. Therefore the last principle has us making small energy adjustments to reroute the path of least resistance and replace bad habits with good ones. The key to creating positive habits is ritual and repeated practice until the actions become ingrained in your brain’s neural chemistry. The key to daily practice is to identify the time, the choices, and the mental and physical effort the habit requires and then reduce it. For instance, to help me workout in the mornings, I sometimes go to sleep in my gym clothes. Then I am one step closer to actually working out, and therefore more apt to do it.

For generations we have been led to believe that happiness orbited success. That if we work hard enough, we will be successful, and then we will become happy. Now we are learning the opposite is true. When we are happy, when our mindset and mood are positive, we are smarter, more motivated and thus more successful. Positive emotions make us more creative and help us build more intellectual, social and physical resources.

I will close this post with a passage from The Happiness Advantage book, “Our brains are like single processors capable of devoting only a finite amount of resources to experiencing the world. Because our brain’s resources are limited, we are left with a choice: to use those finite resources to see only pain, negativity, stress and uncertainty, or to use those resources to look at things through a lens of gratitude, hope, resilience, optimism and meaning. In other words, while we of course can’t change reality through sheer force of will alone, we can use our brain to change how we process the world, and that in turn changes how we react to it. Happiness is not about lying to ourselves, or turning a blind eye to the negative, but about adjusting our brain so that we see the ways to rise above our circumstances.”