Elevating Performance, Productivity and Profitability through Eudaimonic Happiness

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W Forcy Radio, it's employees their affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W Forcy Radio or its employees or affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W Forcy Radio. What's Working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, Doctor release Cortez. Welcome back to Working your Purpose program. Last tuning in again this week, I'm your host, doctor Elis Cortez, joining you at this time, not from Dallas, which is home base for me, but from Seattle. I'm in the Cedar Lodge, which is in the c Tach Airport area. So if you hear some noise and gallivanting, that's what's happening here. People are going about the business of life. It's wonderful. If you don't know me, I'm a management consultant, organizational logo therapist, speaker and author. My team and Iolis Cortes and Associates help companies to enliven and

1:30 fortify their operations by articulating their purpose and building inspirational leaders and cultures activated by meaning and purpose to turn those companies from a flatline EKG through a vibrant destination workplace. There people are intrinsically motivated to perform with their best, grow into their full potential, and are committed to stay and help deliver in the company's mission. You learn more about us now we can work together at at least Cortez dot com. Now listen to Jaday's program. You are in for a treat. My friends with us today is doctor Pellai, who is an educator, musician, best selling author, and the founder of Profitable Happiness through book, software, training, and music. It seeks to change the world by helping organizations build cultures of high employee engagement, experience, and performance. His latest book is Profitable Happiness, the Five Key Habits of a High Performance Organization, which informs we'll be talking about today on air. You do today from Austin, Texas, Doctor Pele, welcome to Working on Purpose. How are you, Doctor Ellis, Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm so excited to be here. It's so wonderful to talk to you again. Book in my day with you. We started the day with together at seven am my time in Seattle, and now here we are three pm my time in Seattle. So welcome back, Pale. It's at least in the Doctor Pella show. There you go. So first, let me just celebrate as I like to do, Doctor Pelee. You know both of us are authors, and you know this is the latest thing that you brought into the world.

2:53 It's beautiful. I've read it, you know, as an author, I'm always amazed what it takes to actually bring a book into the world. So congratulations to you. It is more than making a baby. Just so you know, I've done both. So so I like to say that anybody who's been listening at all, I was like, all right, Cortess, I know you're going to say that, that's fine. All right, let's talk about where you came from, doctor Pelle. You have just really a beautiful history and background that I really find delightful that go into the ingredients of doctor Pele. So if we can first talk about you know, you're upbringing your background and specifically what you learned from your mother. So I know there's a lot you can share. So if you could just do that briefly so we can get into the meat of what you created. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. I like to think of myself as someone who has decided that I will burn all boats and focus all my energies on just one topic, and that topic is happiness. However, in trying to find a way in the world, it's it's it's not as easy. Did you say, hey, I talk about happiness. It's like, you know, you know what type of happiness? What what happiness? What do you really mean? And so luckily there's a lot of evidence in research and science about a type of happiness that is actually known as eudaimonic happiness, which is different from what most people think about when they think of happiness, they think of having fun and rarah, and that's called hedonic happiness, seeking pleasure. But this kind of

4:24 happiness is actually well researched. It goes all the way back to Aristotle. It's called udaimonic happiness, and it's about engagement, about finding that space of flow where time vanishes, about having meaning in the work that you do. And so I really, you know, sort of grabbed onto that because it made a lot of sense to me. I'm a musician. As you can see from my guitar in the background and maybe my keyboard over here, you can see some of these things I do. I've written albums and I even have an album called Profitable Happiness that goes with this book. I'm a little crazy that way. I think I guess everything, while yeah, everything's called profitable happiness. And so I decided to really focus in on the research. You know, my PhD is in organization and management, and so I'm really in line with a lot of the research I did way back when I got my PhD. When I'm thinking about how do you get organizations to have cultures of happy employees. How on earth do you do that? When we know that happy employees do produce profitable companies, Well, how do you actually make that happen? So that's been the question of my career and my life.

5:30 And now the question that you asked is, well, how did I get here? Well, if you don't mind, I'm going to take you all the way back to a jungle in Africa. That's what I want. I know. I'm going to take you all the way back to a jungle in Africa. In the late sixties. I was a child, maybe two three years old, and there was a civil war that had broken out between Nigeria, which is the parent country, and a small little tribe called the Ebos. That's myself. I was an evil child, and the Evils are known for being, you know, very I have to say, entrepreneurial people, very you know self very determined people. They really believe in themselves and they just didn't want to stick around and be part of the larger country, so they decided to secede. Well, now that they did that, unfortunately the West did not support them and it became a blood bath. Nigeria was killing millions and millions of people and I don't know if you remember these black and white pictures with you know, little children, the big stocks of rushore and flies buzzing around their faces. I was one of those children. We were starving, we were we were hungry, We were afraid of bombs killing us every day. It was a terrible time to go through, but we survived that war because of the strangest thing that my mother did. You know, what my mother did was in the absence of food, she couldn't feed us,

7:02 which is running from refugee camp to refugee camp, in the absence of shelter. She couldn't give us these things. But what she could do was the only thing she did, which was to sing to me. And I say us because there were other people, you know, it's kind of you know, the whole It takes a village to raise a child. Everybody's always around in these refugee camps, and so my mother would just sing and she would sing, and she would take my name in pale and put it inside of a song, as though the song that she's written was written for me. And you know what this did to me, besides the fact that it probably was where I started becoming a musician at the age of two or three. What it did was it distracted me from the fear of dying. It distracted me from the pain of hunger, and it made me happy. And for some reason, I found through that experience that happiness comes before success.

7:59 You know, a lot of people, you know Maslow's hierarchy. A lot of people will say that, you know, if you want to succeed, you know, first you have to get your basic needs met. Don't think about happiness yet. That comes later. Just work hard and just make a lot of money, and then someday you'll be happy. That is a misunderstanding of what Maslow was really teaching. In fact, I think that's one of the big misunderstandings in literature. He wasn't saying don't ever think about your happiness. He was just giving a sort of you know, hierarchy and timeframe as a model. So I found that if you actually start with happiness, you'll end up with success. A lot of people think you got to start with success first. And so because we were happy, we were able to form these positive cohesive teams, develop habits as a community, support each other, help each other, be friendly to each other. Even though people are dying left and right, and over time that happiness was one of the things that I think a lot of people attribute that to my mother. That really helped us to survive as we were just a team of people being happy even though we had nothing to be happy about. So that's where I really grabbed onto this concept of happiness and music. And I've been fortunate to become you know, a podcaster like you, and a PhD like you, and you know, you and I are really in the same profession of helping people build cultures of purpose as you do, and myself happiness as I do, and all

9:31 the tools that come with it. So that's my background. I got into this by the accident of a civil war. Well, the reason I wanted you to share that, doctor Plea is for two reasons. One, I wanted listeners and viewers to know you're a little bit more like I know you as a friend. I also consider you a friend and a colleague, and so they can understand just the very unique perspective that you came from, because what you're drawing on is what doctor Sar and Capline taught us in a previous episode experiential intelligence. And I want each of our listeners and viewers to recognize that they have something in their background, something they've experienced it's unique and special that gives him a view in the world that is valuable and useful to teach to others, just like you have given to us. I wanted to do that first, so I wanted them to understand where you came from and then open the pathway for them and to invite them to come with us. Now, the second thing I want to do, and what your background is, I want you to say a little bit about your father his influence, because there's at least two things that I think he gave you that I think are really really powerful. So when you say a little bit about your father's influence on you, that's really May I just say that you're an awesome interviewer.

10:37 We've never had this exchange before. I've always interviewed you on my podcast, and I love your questions. It's just powerful. Thank you so much for the opportunity. You're so correct. I always attribute my love of music and happiness, my embracing of those things to my mother, But my father, who he himself was actually a PhD from the University of Minnesota. My father was really the one who taught me about the pursuit of excellence in what everyone is trying to do. Now, how did that happen? Well back to the Civil War again. My father actually left Nigeria right before the Civil War broke out and came to America to the University of Minnesota to study. So he had he was, He did his undergrad he did, he got all the way to a PhD. And he was basically stuck. Couldn't come back because during the Civil War, you know, there was no way to come back. However, he had named me, given me this fantastic name before he left UM. And the name is, of course, as you know, Pele, I'm named after the greatest soccer player on earth. Now, how are you going to do that to your chat? Right? How are you gonna give? I mean, come on, I'm not gonna be you know. Look, I tried, I tried to play soccer, but I can't play soccer to say in my life. Okay, But you know what happened is that in our culture and the evil culture, if you want your

12:07 child to achieve something, you give them a name that they'll always hold on to, and that name will inspire them even if you're not around. And that's just one of the things that we do. We give names that actually means something that inspire people. So he gave me the name Pela because he wanted me to achieve excellence in my life, okay, and that was his whole purpose for me. Well, it turns out that the reason why Pela just for anyone who doesn't know soccer very well, I'll just tell you why. Pila is the greatest soccer player on earth. He won massive you know, he was the biggest player. He won the World Cup several times with his team in Brazil. And not only that, he was a very courageous person who always looked out for people. During that civil war, Pela announced that he was going to come to do an exhibition match in the middle of the civil war in Nigeria. He left the safety and comfort of Brazil and he just told, you know, against all advice, he said, I'm going to go do that. Yeah. And so the amazing thing, and this was this was captured in Time magazine. Even Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State of the United States, wrote an article about this amazing thing that Pele did to go to a civil war and play a soccer match.

13:26 And so what he did was you know, seeing as bravery and really reaching out to you know, uh, to the masses to help other people. But the amazing thing is that both Nigeria and Biafra the civil war, you know, the people fighting each other, they agreed to stop fighting for two days, for forty eight hours so that Pele and his team could fly in, play the match, and fly out, and everybody watched people who were killing each other a day before decided to go watch this match together in peace. That was amazing. So that level of excellence is really what my father was trying to give me and tell me it should be. Now. When someone asked Pele the soccer player, why are you so good? What is it that you do? Why? Look, if you've ever seen that picture of him kicking a ball backwards, it's called a bicycle kick. He was the only one doing stuff like that, crazy crazy stuff. He would jump in the air, kick a ball backwards and the ball would go into the goal right in the head. Crazy. So someone asked him, how is it that you're so good? And you know what Pele said, He said, everything is practice. Three words, and that's if you've watched any documentary about him and his father and how he grew up, he'll see that he truly believed that and he practiced that. That's how he became Pele. So he didn't become Pele because he was just a talented guy, right, there's a lot of talented people. He became play because of his discipline of petition

15:00 and practice and building habits, habits. That's where I wanted to That's the word that doctor Release has been trying to day. Building habits is the path to any form of excellence, whether it's excellence as a soccer player or excellence in an organization. And so I became a musician instead of a soccer player. And I can tell you as a musician, all we do all day is practice our skinness, right, practice and get our habits going in our fingers. It's called muscle memory, right, same thing. So that's that's my expertise. I'm a habit maker, right. And so I want to just before we go into our first break here, because I want to send people off with something specific. I want to situate what you say in your book and what you want to talk about this morning on our call here we are in twenty twenty three now, and Gallup's most recent polls indicate that two of their most related metrics around happiness, engagement and well being remain at an all time low, with only twenty one percent of employees engaged in working in terms of overall well being. As you said, if you talked about this morning, that those numbers are pretty much stuck for the last three decades.

16:07 So this is what you and I are both focused on. So I want you, if you would, doctor Pile just to kind of quickly briefly situate why those numbers are important. They We're going to take our first break, okay. So first of all, they have not been fixed because people are not focusing on the right things. Right. You know, I have a little parable that I like to share it. It's the goose and the golden eggs. If you remember how yes I do, Yes, yeah, the farmer. The farmer had a goose giving him golden eggs, and he wanted to get the eggs, so he killed the goose. Now that's terrible, but the analogy is the golden eggs are the results, the outcomes that organizations want. But instead of taking care of the goose, the employees. They focus only on the outcomes unfortunately, so I think that that's a debilitating challenge that all organizations have to cross. They have to start to focus on employees.

16:57 And when we come back, I'll give you what I call the three HSH strategy of focus that all organizations need to begin to look at if they want to start taking care of the goose, the employees to get the golden eggs. That is beautiful, doctor Pelle. I think a great way to go into the break. And what I want to send you, ladies and gentlemen, into the break thinking about, is the power of a name says. What we're also going to talking about today is intrinsic motivation. I want you to think about what can you call your team, what can you call your company that would be compelling, something that actually makes you reach for excellence or something beyond yourself. As doctor Pelle's name is given to him, So if you would think about that, and let's go on our next break, our first break. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez. We don't there, doctor Pelle, who is an educator and musician, best selling author, and the founder of Profitable Happiness. We've been talking a bit about where he came from, where his ideas came from, and why this is now important.

17:52 Now we're going to get into after the break some of his key principles says to how to actually make it happen. Stake with us will be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise al i se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on purpose. Before we get back into the program, I do want to remind you, and if you don't already know this, that I am on the Purpose and Enjoy Tour right now. I'm in Seattle. This tour is a collaboration with joy Lee. That's an organization that teaches mindful practices to build a happy, healthy, resilient world. And of course my firm at Least Cortez and associates that activate meaning and purpose and

19:23 company culture and leadership to increase fulfillment, performance and retention. Together, we started this in March. We are actually going across various cities across the United States to find our tribe and build a community of people who seek to elevate their lives and businesses by cultivating meaning, purpose and joy. So here we are in Seattle. Now we're heading down to Portland. Here. If you want to learn more about the tour and the cities that are planned, you can go to gustosnow dot com, go to the tour tab and then find your city. Now if you're just joining us, my guest is doctor Peles. He's the founder of Profitable Happiness. We're talking about his latest book on the topic and the system and software to be devised to enable companies to achieve profitable happiness. I'm your host, Doctor Lee's Cortez So let's get further into this, shall we. I want to I want to start giving our listeners and viewers a little bit more of the science and some of your methodology that you've created. Of course, you know I love anything research oriented. I love your methodology. You know, I aligned with your methodology. So I want to be able to give our listeners and viewers some of the meat so they can walk away already enabled to start to use this stuff. So first, you, like me, do this thing where you get research because of the episodes that you do, right, So I read the books. You read the books, and that is a form of your your research. So you have talked about how you have developed some pitable insights from guests and that has come that's actually supported to research, and that you actually have found this model and acronym of happy that represents these five key employee habits that organizations need to build cultures and high performance around. I think it makes sense to start

20:57 there. What is this happy acronym all about? Yeah? No, no, great, great question. First of all, the happy acronym, while some people may think it's trite, is designed precisely for the purpose of making sure nobody forgets it. Right. So it may be oh, he's got an acronym called happy, yeah, but you're never going to forget that I have an acronym called happy, right. It just goes with you. So that's the purpose of developing the minomic the the acronym h appy. Now, what it actually stands for are the various elements that create engagement, the various elements that create positive well being and organizations, happier employees and so on and so forth. So if you go back to the analogy that we we shared about the about the goose and the golden eggs, think of the goose as the employees, and then of course the golden eggs says the outcome such as sales results, business results, and so on of employees. If you kill the goose, you're gonna you're gonna lose the outcomes, right, And that's that's what happens when when leaders ignore the well being of their employees, they're essentially killing the goose. So in order to make that goose healthy, we need to focus on five elements based on research. Number one is of course happiness, but not hedonic happiness. You diamonic happiness, the kind of happiness

22:32 that's closer tied to engagement and flow and so on. And you know, if you want to know the truth, I didn't want to call my book you diamonic happiness. Lost the crowd. Yeah, I'm not sure it's solved very good, but that's what the science teaches us. So I called it profitable happiness. That that's where that name came from. And then the next thing is appreciation. So AH is for profitable happiness, you diamonic happiness, and A is for appreciation. Research study after study shows and even common sense shows us that when a human being feels appreciated, they will go the extra mile. They will do better than they even thought they were going to do, because guess what somebody cares about what I'm about to do or about what I've been doing. And the kind of appreciation that carries the most weight.

23:21 Sure, peer appreciation is fine and so on, but the kind of appreciation that really connects with people is the type that is given by managers. Yes, now, appreciation is really you know of two types. You know, you do a great job, and you have done a great job, right, there's what you've done versus who you are, And when managers are able to really help their employees feel appreciated as a daily practice, they are really creating a productive employee, and that's an important number two. Number three is pride. Pride is another feeling, very very under researched. If I may say that there's not a lot of not a lot of hard research on this, but a lot of people have done great dissertations on this, and I've read a lot of them, and you know, we found that if a person feels by the way, again, there are two types of pride.

24:12 There's there's a negative kind of pride, r hubristic, I'm the best in the world type of pride, and we know some leaders who act that way, right, We're not going to go there. So there's that kind of pride. But then there's another kind of pride, which is a really strong satisfaction and belief and positive feeling around the work one does or around the company that one works for. So I'm proud of my work, I'm proud of my company in a positive way. That's the kind of pride that we're talking about. And what makes that pride possible again is when people give recognition, especially when leaders and managers give recognition to employees. That pride swells up within them and makes them want to even go the go beyond and doing the greater things. So that the HP and the fourth is the P the second P, which is participate participation. A lot of people talk about employee experience.

25:10 In fact, I would say there was a battle between employee experience and employee engagement, and employee experience is winning right now. People seem to see that as the more powerful force of companies, and it's all good. I say, they're all important, But employee experience, right is impotent without employees creating that experience. Okay, this is the challenge that a lot of organizations don't understand. You can't just command and control, come down from the high mountain and saying this is your experience. Guess what how about you invite those employees to participate in creating that employee experience. When they take ownership of it, they will love it. And that's the simple approach that I take with this idea of participation being so important. And the last thing, which is the why is or yardsticks, which means measure everything. Measure anything that you want to turn into a culture or a habit. You got to measure it.

26:08 You know, Peter Drucker once said what we measure is what will be improved. I think I'm paraphrasing, but he said what gets measured gets improved. I would agree, but I think a more powerful statement would be what gets measured becomes a habit because you're always thinking about it, you're always doing it, you're always measuring it. Before you know it, the power of habits, the psychological and cerebral and brain power of habits, muscle memory takes over and you now have a thing that everybody just automatically does. So when you measure things all the time, you're building cultures, you're building habits. And so that's what I have built. My entire book, my software, and my practice around is helping people implement h appy, gorgeous, so beautiful.

27:00 You know I learned with all that. Okay, now I gotta tell you I learned so much from you in your book about habit formation, my friend. Thank you for that. So if you would, I want you to take us into the ABC of habit creation. M Wow. I love how you put it as ABC, because that is really what it is. Now for those who don't think they're as much of a nerd as doctorate lease or myself. I'm going to try to talk about what ABC means because it is really the center of habits, but not a lot of people are aware of that. In something called organizational behavior management or OBIM or just the practice of helping people change behavior, even if it's a if it's in a home where you know, people who are challenged with behavior are brought to ABC is applied to them to help them build new habits. All right, it's a well science backed, proven approach to behavior change and creation and modification. Now what does ABC st stand for? It stands for the three stages of any behavior.

28:04 The first is what happens before a behavior, it's called the antecedent a. The second is the behavior itself, and the third is what happens after a behavior, which is the consequence. Now, if you go all the way back to Pavlov, for example, where he was, you know, bringing dogs and I can't remember what monkeys, maybe different animals, and maybe he would give them a little antecedent you know, here's the food, and that would act as the thing that comes before the behavior, that that that Pavlov wanted, and they would get the food do the behavior and then they would get a good consequence, you know, and if they didn't do the right behavior, they would get a bad consequence. Right. So this is how you create behavior in all not only humans, but animals. Right.

28:48 So ABC is a well known acronym and approach. Now, if you want to build habits right proactively with human beings, you got to go beyond ABC. Now, this is what you will not find in the literature, but you will find it in my book. What you need to do is you need to make every stage of the ABC system desirable because if you don't do that, you're gonna have an apathy. You're gonna have people not wanting to deal with making habits. Look, I gotta tell you making habits it is not easy. It's hard work. You have to challenge yourself. Oh I gotta get up right now and go take that walk, or oh I gotta You know, it's hard work, a lot of mental energy. So if you don't make it desirable, it'll never get done, no habit will be formed. So how do you make the ABC desirable? A make it get your attention, so when it's time to do that new behavior, get their attention, whether it's allowed belvet rings, or it's a sweetening of the incentives that make you want to do it, whatever it is, get attention.

29:52 Then they do the behavior. While they're doing the behavior, most people will quit because they get tired, lack of motivate, or something else. So you need to provide them a belief that's the be a belief system, motivation to continue, and then at the end when it's time for a consequence that will make them want to go back and do the behavior. Make sure it's a positive consequence. Make sure it's a celebration because when people celebrate, that's a c And people celebrate, they get the positive important doorphins, they feel, the pride, they feel, the appreciation. All of those things make them want to do that behavior again. So if you want happy employees, use the ABC approach on the concept of happiness. If you want engagement, use ABC to build engagement habits and so on and so forth. And that's basically what my book is about, is how do you use habits, which is like the superpower of human beings is habits. How do you use that to change organizations from the employee onward. M That was so deliciously articulated artill.

30:53 Thank you, and I think that's one of the most powerful things about your book. And you're right, what you have written is so crisp. It delineates habits and access to habits so beautifully and compellingly. I can't tell the number of people that I've met who said, oh, I gotta get into a exercise program. You're never going to get there. Saying gotta, it's never going to get there. So, ladies and gentlemen, if you care at all about habits, it's really about creating a culture. This is the book to pick up. So while I am going to send you off to Amazon or wherever it is that you get your books, let's go on to our next break here and then multi will carry on here. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez. We on the year doctor Pele, who was an educator, musician, bestselling author and the founder of Profitable Happiness. We've been talking a bit about some of the guts of his book, just what really makes the essence of it. After the break order to get into some of the more finer details of it, say, well, this will be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management Consultantizing and Meaning and Purpose.

32:00 An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with a lease, send an email to a lease a l I se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I mentioned to you in the first break that we're off doing this Purpose and Joy Tour.

32:54 Two of my latest books are on that tour. They came out in a March of twenty twenty three. One is called The Great Revitalization. How activating meaning and Purpose can radically enliven your business. This is for leaders to learn how to build elevating and high performing leadership and culture. The other recently book that I put out is called Coloring Life How Loss advice is to live more vibrant lives, which helps people navigating loss to transform and grow into vitality. You can look check him out both on on Amazon. Why I look for doctor Pelei's book and if you are just joining us, he is my guest, doctor Peli, the founder of Profitable Happiness. We're talking about his latest book on the topic and the system and software he's devised to enable companies to achieve profitable happiness. I'm your host, doctor Les Cortez. So for this last segment, Doctor Pelei, I just want to I want to just dive into a few of the concepts. There were so many, but just a few that I think are really essential for listeners of yours to understand why your work is so important. So first we've got to go into this whole idea of a bidirectional domino habit of listening. I can virtually guarantee you that this is a novel concept for most organizations, as you know. So could you talk a little bit about this notion of listening as as an essential bidirectional domino habit. Yeah, So first let's start with a domino habit So a habit is really a behavior that you have turned into an automatic sequence using the power of the brain. In fact, I have right here a model of the brain, and the way it basically works is, you know, inputs come

34:25 in a site, sound and so on and so forth into the conscious brain. And if you want to turn anything you're learning, whether it's riding a bike or playing the piano or the guitar, into a habit, then you have to keep repeating it, and keep repeating it until you push it down into the basil ganglia. I'm looking because I have a map on my wall. It looks just like this. I talk about this all the time. I love it. And so this idea of habits, this idea of habits, it's really more than just oh I have a habit. It's really a superpower that we humans have. And when people know how to tap into habits, they can do amazing things, things they didn't believe they could do.

35:06 So how about we apply that to engagement? How about we apply that to happiness. This is the thing that has not been done. You know, we've tried many things, and as we said, thirty years have gone by, and I don't think anybody has really brought the power of habit making into the arena of engagement. And so when we talk about listening as a bidirectional thing and as a domino habit, one habit, one positive habit will create multiple positive habits. That's what a domino habit is. In my book, I coined that term, so I don't know if you'd see it anywhere else. So a domino habit really is a big sort of apparent habit that allows other great habits to happen. Let me give you an example. If I say I'm going to lose weight, right, and I'm going to I'm going to have to maybe walk every morning. Okay, what might happen out of walking every morning is I'll feel when I come back, I gotta take a shower. Now. If I was because I'm hot and muggy or something after the walk, if I was someone who didn't like taking showers in the morning, guess what I'm doing now, I'm building a habit about taking showers.

36:14 But that's not what started this. I wanted to lose weight, and I took a walk, so they're taking a walk. Is a domino habit that gives me things like brushing my teeth in the morning. This is a kind of an extreme example taking a shower, but it really is how you build other habits. So in an organization, if we pick a habit and we say we want to build engagement in order for people to be engaged, they're going to start forming other small, positive habits. That's really how it works in order to support the parent habit. Now, the habit that I have found in the organizations creates the best domino habits is listening. Now you might say, well, why why listening. Well, let's be honest. How well do leaders really listen to their employees and how well do employees really listen to leaders. That's why it has to be bidirectional. Now, leaders could say, hey, yeah, but we do these surveys. We listen all the time. We get all these surveys and people. But you want to know the truth, employees don't like surveys that much. They're getting tired of them, and so what they and by the way, when they do fill out these surveys with their suggestions and their feelings, nothing happens. It's like their responses go to this big corner office in the sky to die and they're like well, why am I giving you all my great suggestions and feedback and frustrations if nobody does anything about them. That's why you need the reciprocity, the bidirectional listening and listen to you, you listen to me, I take

37:46 action on what I listened to. You can see that acting transparently. And we're doing it back and forth. I guess who does it back and forth of listening and responding and taking action a jazz band, all right? And so in my book, my central analogy is the idea of a jam, when impromptu jam, where musicians come together and they listen to each other carefully, they follow each other in wherever the music is going to go. And that's how organizations can improve their you know, interactions, by doing these by finding ways to listen to each other. Now you will have to ask questions. Pulse surveys are a good way to do that, but don't make them long, short, get to the point questions. But do them more frequently and you'll be getting that back and forth happening more like a jazz band.

38:37 And that's that's what I've found to be really powerful is bidirectional listening that has reciprocity and transparency and accountability right, which is what allows then the employees also start to weigh in with what workplace do they actually want and why. The reason I want you to bring that after, doctor Palaia is that I've done many employee engagement services with organizations, but and I that they share those results, but many organizations don't. So it's the black hole thing. So now we need that circular piece, that bidirectional piece you're talking about. So that's what I wanted to first distinguished. Now second, if you would, I know you'll you know a lot about this. I want you to distinguish appreciation versus gratitude. M Now, I don't know if I'm pulled out a second.

39:22 I'm not sure I'm that qualified to appreciate to talk about the difference between gratitude and appreciation, because they're really they're really, actually very different. Appreciation is something that you can do to someone and maybe there's another angle I'm missing, but you can actually show appreciation to someone. But gratitude is something you kind of have to generate yourself. You have to say, you know what I feel. I'm going to spend some time and feel gratitude for this thing that I have, and so it's a personal it's kind of a personal action that you're taking, versus appreciation really can come from someone else. Right, of course, you can appreciate yourself too, but you know, other people can either appreciate you or not appreciate you, and that can be a real problem. I think the big distinction is the difference between appreciation and recognition, which is another area where people kind of don't. Yeah, So for recognition, you know, recognition has been shown by a lot of research to be the engine of pride. This is what makes people feel proud of their work, is when someone recognizes you, Oh wow, great job that thing you did. And appreciation is really more something that people do to show you about, to show you they appreciate the quality of who you are versus the quality of what you've done. Yes, so what you've done goes in the recognition camp. Appreciation takes the who you are camp. Right, it's sort of you know, I'm getting that personal connection who I am. And then the

40:54 first one, gratitude is what I need to generate and feel by myself in order to be happy. In fact, the greatest tool of happiness is generating personal gratitude. For everything around you. So whether you're doing a gratitude journal yourself or you're just thinking about it, you're the blessings you have every morning. That's how you create happiness is through gratitude. Oh I love that. And what's why I appreciate that is you know I do I talk to later say you know, I do appreciate my people. I tell them that and their performance with this every year. That's not it. That's not what we're talking about here. Okay, So now I want to if we can, I want to I want to go a little bit layer deeper here. This creating a culture of positive pride. You give some tactics here, and there's about seven or eight of them, if you would just made speak to a few of them, because I want people to understand that that this is actionable.

41:46 Yeah, how do we do this? Yes? Now, just to be clear, listening is on that list, because listening is that powerful domino habit. Yes, it makes people. That makes people feel hey, if they're listening to me, then maybe I can have I can feel psychological safety here, which is another one of those items that you talked about. Maybe I can feel free to give feedback, Maybe I can be maybe I feel inclusive, it's are inclusive or not I feel inclue. Maybe I feel include dead in this organization, regardless of my orientation or background, and so on and so forth. So all of these things contribute to a sense of psychological safety. It's hard for a person to feel pride when they don't feel safe in an organization. If you have a micromanaging boss, it's really difficult for you to feel pride in the things that you're doing because guess what they're doing it right. And so all of these things are intertwined. And I highlight these things in my book because the software that I've built, called Profitable Happiness, is a one to one mapping of these concepts. It's literally taking all of the science about psychological safe and listening and you know, all these concepts, and it's making them tangible in software. Why because if you can go from happiness or the feelings or engagement to building habits that make those things really take action on them, that's how you get high performance. I call that

43:19 the three H approach. Happiness takes you to habits, takes you to high performance, and the way you do that is through software. And I want you to talk about that, Dr Kelly, because I you know, you and I've spoken over the few years that we've known each other, and then most recently about what you've just recently created. I mean that you've created a framework and supporting software to help companies create these high performance organizations through profitable happiness. So what I appreciate it is it's one thing to birth the concept the methodology. It's quite another to go ahead and bolt on a whole software to actually and engine it, if you will. So would you say just a little bit about how your software works, how does it map in and back into your framework precisely? Um, you know, the first thing I would say is that my software follows a strategy. I'm going to use another acronym called leap. And the reason I'm going to use this this acronym is because it identifies listening as the very first thing that you have to do in an organization. The second thing is that listening has to activate employee engagement. By listening to people and making it reciprocal and making sure that people know that we're here together, everybody becomes more engaged. So that's l and that's equal that leads to action, which when repeated over and over, creates these habits we've been talking about to LA and then finally it is when these actions start to

44:51 create the productivity that everybody's looking for, that's when we get high performance p. Yeah. So, so my focus has been on how to build software that helps you leap from where you are now to where you need to be in your organization, which is a culture of happiness. Now, how we do that is, basically, we help employees focus every single week on one thing. Right now, you may have heard, I think they say whatever you focus on is what will grow or what will build or whatever. Right, that's just the way the mind works. The mind can't do two things really at a time very well. Despite what you've heard about multitasking. The mind really likes to focus, and if it focuses, it does very well on that thing. So how do you help employees focus on something? You ask them questions. You know, if I ask every time I see my son, hey how are you doing on that math question? There, next time I see him, hey how are you doing on that math question?

45:52 Next time I see him, same question, He's going to go off somewhere in his little world and say, you know, what that keeps asking me about math? What is this math thing? And whether he likes it or not, he's going to focus on math a little bit more than he normally would. And that's how you get people to focus. So you build habits of focus on specific things like engagement, and that's how the software works. Every Friday, you get an email that invites you to answer a couple of questions about engagement, happiness or if we're using doctor Elsa's book, purpose and those questions would help the employees over time form habits are and cultures around those things. And then from that data, we take that data about all these questions we're asking over fifty two weeks of a year, and then we give them advice. And that's where AI comes in. I know a lot of people are wondering whether AI is good or bad. Well, it's actually pretty good because it can give you great advice on what to do given the data that you have in your organization. So that's how our system works. Beautiful, and what a way to take us into the finish. My gosh, Doctor Pelle, that was so much. Okay, So we know by now that this show was listened to by people around the world, and they are interested in helping to create workplaces where people actually thrive, want to come to work and do their best, and we do business and betters to the world.

47:09 What would you like to leave them with? I would like to leave them with two things. First of all, believe that it's possible to build cultures of profitable happiness, high engagement, high productivity, purpose and meaning you do it using software like I've just described. And then the second thing I'd like to leave them with is you can get that software right now for free because we are in a pre beta phase. Our team has developed the software and we are looking for the right small to medium sized enterprises or companies who would want to implement it so that we can track their progress over time, because that data becomes the data we use to go to market when we're ready, so they become prototype testers or beta testers for us. So if anyone is interesting stid in having software that really helps you build your culture of high performance, this is an opportunity to get that without spending a dime. That's my author That's a pretty good way to finish the show. Doctor Pele who bring it home all right, listeners and viewers, He'll learn more about doctor Pella in the work that he is doing. Where should they go Doctor pell What? What what website? Profitable Happiness dot com is the software my personal speaking website If anybody wants to bring me in to come do a little speech, is doctor Peli dot com. And then of course I'm on LinkedIn and my handle is doctor play drpel E. Thank you listeners and viewers. Last

48:40 week I missed the live show you Know It's ketch. We recorded podcast if we were on the are with Alex Bruckman, the author of Secrets of Next Level Entrepreneurs, Eleven powerful lessons to thrive in business and lead a balance life. What a concept a balance life is an entrepreneur? It was an amazing conversation. Next week we'll be on the air with Alex Goorchev, the author of Fearless Innovation, going beyond the buzzword to continuously drive growth, improve the bottom line, and enact change. See you there. Remember that work is at least an important part of our lives. It's integral to our being and it can be one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose See you next week. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortez, each week on W FOURCY.

49:28 Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's Work on Purpose.