Name: Shawn Achor Keynote Speaker at ICMA 2015
Uploaded: 2026-03-26T20:53:42.000Z
Duration: 3 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Well, I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by this year's, uh, first keynote speaker, Sean Achor.

I really enjoyed it, uh, earlier on today.

Give us a little bit, if you would, about some an insight into what's behind the book.

So the main thesis is we needed to start researching not what was broken, but what was working.

So we started looking at what caused people to feel greater levels of happiness, or meaning, or well-being in their life.

And what we discovered and, and stumbled over, actually

was this idea that we were not just our genes and our environment,

but by changing small mindset changes or changing our habits over the course of the day, we could actually raise our levels of happiness above our genetic set point and be able to divorce our happiness just from the environment.

So what it meant was that scientifically happiness could actually be a choice if we started doing some work.

So the whole book is, uh, based around that idea: that scientifically happiness is a choice, happiness is an advantage,

and then happiness spreads to other people.

And you talk about, uh, seven, uh, fundamentals behind this.

but it might be more helpful to, like, to kind of see two or three that, like, are, are representative of the whole.

So, for example, one of the things that we looked at in there, uh, is something called the happiness advantage itself.

And the happiness advantage is this idea that when the human brain is positive, every single business and educational outcome improves.

So it's finding those small little habits that get somebody there.

So at the end of my talk today, I'm going to be describing how, um, within two minutes, you know, akin to brushing your teeth, you can actually train your brain for greater levels of optimism, which then allow us to have all those, uh, health outcomes, business outcomes, educational outcomes, gratitude exercises, attention training like meditation, exercise, journaling about positive experiences, uh, doing a conscious act of kindness for somebody else.

Those very small things actually have huge, uh, implications in terms of, uh, the outcomes in our life.

It's just very simple small things actually tip the balance, make it so much easier to choose the positive, and

as a result of that, to reap that happiness advantage.

Now, the folks starting to come in, uh, uh, here today, I mean, my experience is that these are a pretty optimistic, uh, group of people.

You know, they are actually you talk in the book about people having a calling, and,

and they're very much here to serve their communities,

but they work in very stressful occupations and covering a lot of, uh, employees.

Uh, how do you actually go and motivate your, your staff, your employees to, to kind of make the difference that you're talking about?

Well, this is part of the reason I'm so excited to be here in Seattle, because I think that this research validates the people who have been coming in.

This is the I mean, as I've been meeting people here in the hotel and in the hallways, I mean, this research is showing how if you're a rational optimist, if you realistically assess the present but still believe that your behavior matters, if linked to the right people, those are the very types of people who can make positive change within our communities.

They're the ones who can be resilient in the face of the challenges they're experiencing.

So on the one hand, I want to validate the work that they're already doing and show them that there's research to show how important it is to keep making those steps.

But the other side is I want them to leave with a few tools.

There are very simple things we could do within our lives or in our interactions with other people that could actually tip them towards the positive.

So we're going to talk about some of the work I did, uh, working in hospitals, about how we could actually get, uh, entire hospitals, uh, to improve the quality of care simply by changing the way that people walk around the hallway.

Or we're going to talk, uh, today about how the very first comment in a conversation actually predicts the course of the conversation.

So, uh, tilting those conversations in favor of positive by starting with something positive.

When someone says, "Hello, how are you doing?" it's a perfect, perfect opportunity to use a power lead.

Well, Sean, thank you ever so much indeed for joining us today.